Written language

“ Written language is the arbitrary visual sign of spoken language, and spoken language is the arbitrary sign, it may be, of an experienced thing or of an abstract idea. Is, then, this property of our ideas which we call truth the correspondence of ideas with their objects, and is falsity the absence of this correspondence? ”

“ Articulate and written words, the signs of ideas, being conventional, we can apply them justly only so far as we have received the impression associated with the ideas they represent, only so far as they are made familiar by the habit of reading and listening. In other words, the double talent of understanding the written and spoken foreign language conduces respectively to the arts of writing and speaking. ”

“ The material and subject of linguistic science is language, in its entirety; all the accessible forms of human speech, in their infinite variety, whether still living in the minds and mouths of men, or preserved only in written documents, or carved on the scantier but more imperishable records of brass and stone. It has a field and scope limited to no age, and to no portion of mankind. ”

“ In a word, linguistics is receiving careful attention in its various aspects, or from different points-of-view. Language, tongue, graphic and oral speech, with their subdivisions and relations, are regarded with some consideration for perspective.
The elements of language are sought both internally and externally to its organic structure; and progress has been made in the appreciating of their reciprocal relations or interdependent laws. The phenomena of written and phonetic language are compared and weighed; their systems have been analysed and deductions have been made from the analyses. ”

“ Thinking beings conceive ideas of things.
Those who employ language adopt sounds or signs to convey those ideas to others.
[41] On these obvious principles rest the whole superstructure of all language, spoken or written. Objects are presented to the mind, impressions are there made, which, retained, constitute the idea, and, by agreement, certain words are employed as the future signs or representations of those ideas. ”

“ There are many reasons why unwritten languages, like those of America, are more interesting, more promising in results, to the student of linguistics, than those which for 317generations have been cast in the conventional moulds of written speech. ”

“ It is always very late in the day before the seminal principles of speech are detected and explained. Indeed, the language which owed to them both birth and growth may have ceased to be a living tongue before these, the regulating elements of its formation, come to light, and are embodied in written grammars. ”

“ Language-oral and written-is probably the most complex system of signs that researchers are aware of. Although the word language comprises experiences in other sign systems, it is by no means their synthesis. ”

“ and all speech, written or spoken, is in a dead language until it finds a willing and prepared hearer. ”

“ The learner is supposed to be unacquainted with all but his own native [xii] tongue; and in what other, consistently with reason and common sense, would you go about to explain it to him? When he has a competent knowledge of the main principles, the common terms, the general rules, the whole subject and business of Grammar, exemplified in his own Language; he then will apply himself with great advantage to any foreign language, whether ancient or modern. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I do not doubt that it might far exceed, both in wealth of resources and in distinct apprehensibility, many an existing spoken language, might ally itself with a mode of writing, and become an efficient means and aid of human progress. ”

“ It does not explain the value of words, nor their proper use, and adds little to our vocabulary, though an abundance of words is indispensable to correct speaking and writing. It teaches neither pronunciation nor accent, nor the orthography of the variable parts of words, nor their diverse meanings, nor the difference of signification between words improperly called synonyms, nor the propriety of figurative language, nor any of those delicacies of expression which constitute the genius of a language, and characterize a clear, elegant, and correct style. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Grammar, {ix}as an art, is, undoubtedly, the art of speaking and writing correctly—but then, as an art, it is only required for foreign languages. For our own we have the necessary practice and familiarity. ”

“ Facts, incidents, plots, simply form the artistic speech—its mode of expression, or medium—and if there is no idea behind the facts, then you have no longer language but gibberish. Just as language is made up of the letters of the alphabet, arranged in significant words and sentences; so is the artistic language made up of plots, incidents, sentences which are informed with significance. ”

“ Now, when we speak of a thorough mastery of a foreign language, we mean that sort of knowledge which grasps the sense of a printed page without conscious effort, appreciating all those nicer subtleties of language that lie beyond the reach of grammar and lexicon. ”

“ The linguist, as we have already seen, is frequently or usually unable to discover the exact meaning of the word in the original language, and hence is uncertain as to the degree of development of any art or technique. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Here let me be permitted to remind the reader, that the positions, which I controvert, are contained in the sentences—‘a selection of the REAL language of men’;—‘the language of these men’ (i. e. men in low and rustic life) ‘I propose to myself to imitate, and, as far as is possible, to adopt the very language of men.’ ‘Between the language of prose and that of metrical composition, there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference.’ It is against these exclusively that my opposition is directed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They are only a man-made language, a conceptual shorthand, as someone calls them, in which we write our reports of nature; and languages, as is well known, tolerate much choice of expression and many dialects. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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!” ”

“ It is in meditating on the thoughts of the great writers of antiquity, and in translating their masterpieces, that we discover their beauties, and are able to transfer them into our native language.
In living languages these four arts should be the object of study. To say that one class of languages is learned to be spoken, and the other class to be read, does not express the exact difference of aim in the two cases. The art of speaking is useless unless we understand what is said, and this talent of understanding is a hundred times more useful than that of speaking. ”

“ V. Dialectal and Popular Words.
Whether words may, by conscious effort, be preserved in colloquial usage is an unsolved question, though perhaps our Society may help to solve it; there is, however, another and more certain benefit which its members, or at any rate such of them as are writers, may confer upon the language. There are many excellent words spoken in uneducated speech and dialect all about us, which would be valuable additions to our standard vocabulary if they could be given currency in it. ”

“ Does it not follow, then, that the more accurately we use words the closer definition we shall give to our thoughts? “And by drilling ourselves to write perspicuously we train our minds to clarify our thought, since language is the expression of thought. ”

“ Is the language scientific, or is it, as we say, literary?—that is, the language of poetry and emotion, approximative language, thrown out, as it were, at certain great objects which the human mind augurs and feels after, but not language accurately defining them? Popular religion says, we know, that the language is scientific ”

“ As has been said, strength of thought and strength of language are their prevailing characteristics. Their strength of language is that which belongs to the speech of a people when it is fresh and new, and before it has been overlaid with words created for literary purposes and by the introduction of foreign words to give niceties of meaning, and no cultivated language has the same power and directness as that which is the simple expression of the thoughts of the people. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ We find spelling-books filled with lists of words to be memorized; we find grammars filled with names and definitions of all the different forms which the language assumes; we find rhetorics filled with the names of every device ever employed to give effectiveness to language; we find books on literature filled with the names, dates of birth and death, and lists of works, of every writer any one ever heard of: and when we have learned all these names we are no better off than when we started. ”

“ On the contrary, he considers that in them the life and growth of language is seen more clearly than in dead literary languages, on whose study the science of comparative philology was at first exclusively built up. ”

“ But whether the verb or the noun was the first to be invented is of little importance; nor is it possible for us, at the very beginning of our inquiry into the nature of language, to enter upon a minute examination of a theory which represents language as a work of human art, and as established by mutual agreement as a medium of communication. ”

“ Attend minutely to your style, whatever language you speak or write in; seek for the best words, and think of the best turns. Whenever you doubt of the propriety or elegance of any word, search the dictionary or some good author for it, or inquire of somebody, who is master of that language; and, in a little time, propriety and elegance of diction will become so habitual to you, that they will cost you no more trouble. ”

“ It is the object of the comparative philologist to gather up the scattered fragments, to arrange them and fit them, and thus to show that language is something rational, human, intelligible, the very embodiment of the mind of man in its growth from the lowest to the highest stage, and with capabilities for 39 further growth far beyond what we can at present conceive or imagine. ”