Standard language

“ It is, of course, possible to arrest to some extent the change in an artificial language by the influence of academies, who shall authoritatively decide upon the permissibility or otherwise of the use of a certain word or phrase; but under normal circumstances the involuntary development which we have spoken of is characteristic of a standard language as well as of language in general. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But, when all is said, there remains to be taken into account the difference in each individual’s pronunciation, and his greater or less capacity for assimilating the difference between the artificial dialect and his own. These considerations will always operate as powerful solvents of the integrity of a standard language.
It must further be noticed that the stock of words and their meanings, as well as inflections and syntax of the artificial or standard language, are constantly being recruited from the natural language. ”

“ What is to be considered ‘correct’ or ‘standard’ in matters of pronunciation, spelling, grammar and idiom? Can (or should) individuals exert themselves to improve their mother-tongue by enriching it with new terms and by making it purer, more precise, more fit to express subtle shades of thought, more easy to handle in speech or in writing, etc.? (A few hints on such questions may be found in my paper “Energetik der Sprache” in Scientia, 1914.) Is it possible to construct an artificial language on scientific principles for international use? ”

“ The different individual dialects of any country, i.e. the forms of language used by each individual, are constantly changing their position in respect to the norm, or standard written language. On the one hand, the natural changes incident to all language are always tending to alienate these from the norm; on the other, the conscious and artificial efforts made to approximate the individual language to the norm are constantly in play side by side with the other tendency. ”

“ A single linguistic area may, under the proper conditions, develop a duality or even a plurality of standards, though instances of the entire co-ordination of two different standards are, in the history of language, very rare. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For it ought to be remembered, that over any fugitive colloquial dialect, which has never been fixed by visible signs, grammar has no control; and that the speaking which the art or science of grammar teaches, is exclusively that which has reference to a knowledge of letters. It is the certain tendency of writing, to improve speech. And in proportion as books are multiplied, and the knowledge of written language is diffused, local dialects, which are beneath the dignity of grammar, will always be found to grow fewer, and their differences less. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is true that in many of these books we may find prefaces which say, “All other books err in clinging too closely to mere system, to names; but we will break away and give you the real thing.” But they don't do it; they can't afford to be too radical, and so they merely modify in a few details the same old system, the system of names. Yet it is a great point gained when the necessity for a change is realized.
How, then, shall we go about our mastery of the English language?
Modern science has provided us a universal method by which we may study and master any subject. ”

“ Thus if i in the words, bind, find, mind, has its first sound, it ought to have the same sound in other similar combinations, kind, blind, grind. This is the rule of analogy, the great leading principle that should regulate the construction of all languages. But as languages are not formed at once by system, and are ever exposed to changes, it must necessarily happen that there will be in all languages, some exceptions from any general rule; some departures from the principle of uniformity.
The practice of a nation, when universal or ancient, has, in most cases, the force and authority of law ”

“ 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 ”

“ Is it not, on the contrary, fairly certain that the use of an auxiliary language, if universal, would open up for many regions from which exclusion is now felt as a hindrance?
Take the case of a doctor, scientist, scholar, researcher in any branch of knowledge, who desires to keep abreast of the advance of knowledge in his particular line. He may have to wait for years before a translation of some work he wishes to read is published in a tongue he knows, and in any case all the periodical literature of every nation, except the one or two whose languages he may learn, will be closed to him. ”

“ It is true, indeed, that neither any ancient system of grammatical instruction nor any grammar of an other language, however contrived, can be entirely applicable to the present state of our tongue; for languages must needs differ greatly one from an other, and even that which is called the same, may come in time to differ greatly from what it once was. But the general analogies of speech, which are the central principles of grammar, are but imperfectly seen by the man of one language. ”

“ The very palpable reason for this is that, before we can advantageously study the System of a Language, we must have acquired a certain quantity of the detail of it. Now, in the attempt to collect ideas of General Grammar from the study of a Foreign Language, we shall find that the Theory will be swamped by the Practice; in other words, that, by attempting to do two things at once, we shall do one of them badly. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And it is sufficiently known that many men, by their own industry, without the method or rules of grammar, have gotten a competent understanding in divers languages: and many unletter'd persons will, by use and exercise, without Grammar rules, learn to speak and understand some languages in far shorter time than any do learn them by method and rule, as is clearly manifest by those that travel.... ”

“ 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. ”

“ I have no intention of analyzing all the attempts hitherto made towards the creation of an Universal Language, but shall content myself with calling the reader’s attention to the fact that all these authors have striven to create a system of signs wherewith briefly to communicate thought in case of necessity, or have limited themselves to a natural simplification of grammar, or to exchanging words that now exist in living languages by others made up for the occasion, or taken by chance. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For the second type of language-study, on the other hand, where the end is culture and the language is studied for itself and in no wise as an indifferent means, a universal artificial language offers no substitute at all. ”

“ This common ground is assumed by everyone who maintains the idea of literacy-how else to establish it?-as a necessity, but understood in many different ways: the common ground as embodied in vocabulary and grammar, in logic, spelling, phonetics, cultural heritage. Granted that a common language is a necessary condition for communication, such a common language is not simultaneously a sufficient condition, or at least not one of most efficient, for communication. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Hence speech must soon fail to serve the new developments of thought, unless the process of word-building can be itself proportionately improved; unless, in other words, a new and scientifically constructed Language can be devised adequate to all the wants of science. It would seem that there should occur, in the range of possibilities, the existence of the Plan in Nature of a New and Universal Language, copious, flexible, and expressive beyond measure; competent to meet the highest demands of definition and classification ”

“ As to the second general principle, namely, that the terminations and plurals of our words, together with their compounds and derivatives, should be adapted to the structure and genius of the English language; it will not perhaps by many be thought of equal importance with the first. There is perhaps no language that is more irregular than ours, or that admits of more licence in many respects. ”

“ But whatever necessity there may be for a great variety of modes and tenses in dialects, constructed upon arbitrary principles, it does not appear that any more than one is needful for a natural language, or that the modes of conjugating verbs or any other, are in fact expressible by human speech any otherwise than by the whole form or order of inflection and things. ”

“ All languages, however different, have many things in common. There are points of a philosophical character, which result alike from the analysis of any language, and are founded on the very nature of human thought, and that of the sounds or other signs which are used to express it. When such principles alone are taken as the subject of inquiry, and are treated, as they sometimes have been, without regard to any of the idioms of particular languages, they constitute what is called General, Philosophical, or Universal Grammar. ”

“ As the languages of the world, as the forms of speech mutually unintelligible, are counted by the hundred, and the dialects by the thousand, the field is a large one—one supplying much exercise, work, and labour. But the applications of the results obtained are wide also; for, as long as any form of mental philosophy remains susceptible of improvement, as long as its improved form remains undiffused, so long will a knowledge of the structure of language in general, a knowledge of comparative philology, a knowledge of general grammar (for we may choose our term) , have its use and application. ”

“ It is at last becoming recognized, however, that each group of languages, as well as each language in the several groups, has its own linguistic laws peculiar to itself, and to apply these to other groups and languages in which they have not been proved to exist, is to do violence to the comparative method itself. ”

“ The methods by which we utilize these capacities are generally characterized by conscious work (such as analysis and synthesis) and by conversion, i.e. converting written into spoken (reading aloud) , converting spoken into written (dictation) , converting from one language into another (translation) , or converting one grammatical form into another (conjugation, declension, etc.) . All exercises requiring the use of the eyes and the hand are of the studial order, as are also those connected with accidence and derivation. ”