# Language and the Study of Language/Lecture I

LANGUAGE
AND
THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE.
LECTURE I.
Those who are engaged in the investigation of language have but recently begun to claim for their study the rank and title of a science. Its development as such has been wholly the work of the present century, although its germs go back to a much more ancient date. It has had a history, in fact, not unlike that of the other sciences of observation and induction—for example, geology, chemistry, astronomy, physics—which the intellectual activity of modern times has built up upon the scanty observations and crude inductions of other days. Men have always been learning languages, in greater or less measure; adding to their own mother-tongues the idioms of the races about them, for the practical end of communication with those races, of access to their thought and knowledge. There has, too, hardly been a time when some have not been led on from the acquisition of languages to the study of language. The interest of this precious and wonderful possession of man, at once the sign and the means of his superiority to the rest of the animal ​creation, has in all ages strongly impressed the reflecting and philosophical, and impelled them to speculate respecting its nature, its history, and its origin. Researches into the genealogies and affinities of words have exercised the ingenuity of numberless generations of acute and inquiring minds. Moreover, the historical results attainable by such researches, the light cast by them upon the derivation and connection of races, have never wholly escaped recognition. The general objects and methods of linguistic study are far too obviously suggested, and of far too engaging interest, not to have won a certain share of regard, from the time when men first began to inquire into things and their causes.
Nothing, however, that deserved the name of a science was the result of these older investigations in the domain of language, any more than in those of chemistry and astronomy. Hasty generalizations, baseless hypotheses, inconclusive deductions, were as rife in the former department of study as they were in the two latter while yet passing through the preliminary stages of alchemy and astrology. The difficulty was in all the cases nearly the same; it lay in the paucity of observed facts, and in the faulty position which the inquirer assumed toward them. There had been no sufficient collection and classification of phenomena, to serve as the basis of inductive reasoning, for the establishment of sound methods and the elaboration of true results; and along with this, and partly in consequence of it, prejudice and assumption had usurped the place of induction. National self-sufficiency and inherited prepossession long helped to narrow the limits imposed by unfavourable circumstances upon the extent of linguistic knowledge, restraining that liberality of inquiry which is indispensable to the growth of a science. Ancient peoples were accustomed to think each its own dialect the only true language; other tongues were to them mere barbarous jargons, unworthy of study. Modern nations, in virtue of their history, their higher culture, and their Christianity, have been much less uncharitably exclusive; and their reverence for the two classical idioms, the Greek and Latin, and for the language of the Old Testament, the ​Hebrew, so widened their linguistic horizon as gradually to prepare the way for juster and more comprehensive views of the character and history of human speech. The restless and penetrating spirit of investigation, finally, of the nineteenth century, with its insatiable appetite for facts, its tendency to induction, and its practical recognition of the unity of human interests, and of the absolute value of all means of knowledge respecting human conditions and history, has brought about as rapid a development in linguistic study as in the kindred branches of physical study to which we have already referred. The truth being once recognized that no dialect, however rude and humble, is without worth, or without a bearing upon the understanding of even the most polished and cultivated tongues, all that followed was a matter of course. Linguistic material was gathered in from every quarter, literary, commercial, and philanthropic activity combining to facilitate its collection and thorough examination. Ancient records were brought to light and deciphered; new languages were dragged from obscurity and made accessible to study.
The recognition, not long to be deferred when once attention was turned in the right direction, of the special relationship of the principal languages of Europe with one another and with the languages of south-western Asia—the establishment of the Indo-European family of languages—was the turning-point in this history, the true beginning of linguistic science. The great mass of dialects of the family, descendants of a common parent, covering a period of four thousand years with their converging lines of development, supplied just the ground which the science needed to grow up upon, working out its methods, getting fully into view its ends, and devising the means of their attainment. The true mode of fruitful investigation was discovered; it appeared that a wide and searching comparison of kindred idioms was the way in which to trace out their history, and arrive at a real comprehension of the life and growth of language. Comparative philology, then, became the handmaid of ethnology and history, the forerunner and founder of the science of human speech.
​No single circumstance more powerfully aided the onward movement than the introduction to Western scholars of the Sanskrit, the ancient and sacred dialect of India. Its exceeding age, its remarkable conservation of primitive material and forms, its unequalled transparency of structure, give it an indisputable right to the first place among the tongues of the Indo-European family. Upon their comparison, already fruitfully begun, it cast a new and welcome light, displaying clearly their hitherto obscure relations, rectifying their doubtful etymologies, illustrating the laws of research which must be followed in their study, and in that of all other languages. What linguistic science might have become without such a basis as was afforded it in the Indo-European dialects, what Indo-European philology might have become without the help of the Sanskrit, it were idle to speculate: certain it is that they could not have grown so rapidly, or reached for a long time to come the state of advancement in which we now already behold them. As a historical fact, the scientific study of human speech is founded upon the comparative philology of the Indo-European languages, and this acknowledges the Sanskrit as its most valuable means and aid.
But to draw out in detail the history of growth of linguistic science down to the present time, with particular notice of its successive stages, and with due mention of the scholars who have helped it on, does not lie within the plan of these lectures. Interesting as the task might be found, its execution would require more time than we can spare from topics of more essential consequence. A brief word or two is all we can afford to the subject. Germany is, far more than any other country, the birthplace and home of the study of language. There was produced, at the beginning of this century, the most extensive and important of the preliminary collections of material, specimens of dialects with rude attempt at their classification—the "Mithridates" of Adelung and Vater. There Jacob Grimm gave the first exemplification on a grand scale of the value and power of ​the comparative method of investigation in language, in his grammar of the Germanic dialects, a work of gigantic labour, in which each dialect was made to explain the history and character of all, and all of each. There—what was of yet greater consequence—Bopp laid, in 1816, the foundation of Indo-European comparative philology, by his "Conjugation-system of the Sanskrit Language, as compared with the Greek, Latin, Persian, and German;" following it later with his Comparative Grammar of all the principal languages of the Indo-European family—a work which, more than any other, gave shape and substance to the science. There, too, the labours of such men as the Schlegels, Pott, and Wilhelm von Humboldt, especially of the last-named, extended its view and generalized its principles, making it no longer an investigation of the history of a single department of human speech, but a systematic and philosophical treatment of the phenomena of universal language and their causes. The names of Rask, too, the Danish scholar and traveller, and of Burnouf, the eminent French savant, must not be passed unnoticed among those of the founders of linguistic science. Indeed, how ripe the age was for the birth of this new branch of human knowledge, how natural an outgrowth it was of the circumstances amid which it arose, is shown by the fact that its most important methods were worked out and applied, more or less fully, at nearly the same time, by several independent scholars, of different countries—by Rask, Bopp, Grimm, Pott, Burnouf.
A host of worthy rivals and followers of the men whose names we have noted have arisen in all parts of Europe, and even in America, to continue the work which these had begun; and by their aid the science has already attained a degree of advancement that is truly astonishing, considering its so recent origin. Though still in its young and rapidly growing stage, with its domain but just surveyed and only partially occupied, its basis is yet laid broadly and deeply enough, its methods and laws are sure enough, the objects it aims at and the results it is yielding are sufficiently important, in themselves and in their bearing upon other branches of human knowledge, to warrant it in challenging a place ​among the sciences, as not the least worthy, though one of the youngest, of their sisterhood, and to give it a claim which may not be disregarded to the attention of every scholar, and of every well-educated person.
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. The dialects of the obscurest and most humbly endowed races are its care, as well as those of the leaders in the world's history. Whenever and wherever a sound has dropped from the lips of a human being, to signalize to others the movements of his spirit, this science would fain take it up and study it, as having a character and office worthy of attentive examination. Every fact of every language, in the view of the linguistic student, calls for his investigation, since only in the light of all can any be completely understood. To assemble, arrange, and explain the whole body of linguistic phenomena, so as thoroughly to comprehend them, in each separate part and under all aspects, is his endeavour. His province, while touching, on the one hand, upon that of the philologist, or student of human thought and knowledge as deposited in literary records, and, on the other hand, upon that of the mere linguist, or learner of languages for their practical use, and while exchanging friendly aid with both of these, is yet distinct from either. He deals with language as the instrument of thought, its means of expression, not its record; he deals with simple words and phrases, not with sentences and texts. He aims to trace out the inner life of language, to discover its origin, to follow its successive steps of growth, and to deduce the laws that govern its mutations, the recognition of which shall account to him for both the unity and the variety of its present manifested phases; and, along with this, to apprehend the nature of language as a human endowment, its relation to thought, its influence upon the development of ​intellect and the growth of knowledge, and the history of mind and of knowledge as reflected in it.
The exceeding interest of this whole class of inquiries is at first sight manifest, but it grows to our sense in measure as we reflect upon it. We are apt to take language, like so many other things of familiar daily use, as a thing of course, without appreciating the mystery and deep significance which belong to it. We clothe our thoughts without effort or reflection in words and phrases, having regard only to the practical ends of expression and communication, and the power conferred by them: we do not think of the long history, of changes of form and changes of signification, through which each individual vocable employed by us has passed, of the labour which its origination and gradual elaboration has cost to successive generations of thinkers and speakers. We do not meditate upon the importance to us of this capacity of expression, nor consider how entirely the history of man would have been changed had he possessed no such faculty; how little of that enlightenment which we boast would have been ours, if our ancestors had left no spoken memorial of their mental and spiritual acquisitions; how, in short, without speech, the noble endowments of our nature would have remained almost wholly undeveloped and useless. It is, indeed, neither to be expected nor desired that our minds should be continually penetrated with a realizing sense of the marvellous character of language; but we should be inexcusable if we neglected altogether to submit it to such an examination as should make us understand its nature and history, and should prepare our minds to grasp by reflection its whole significance.
These and such as these are the objects most directly aimed at by the scientific student of language. But there are others, of a different character, to which his investigations conduct him hardly less immediately, and which constitute an essential part of the interest which invests them. It is a truth now almost as familiar as, fifty years ago, it would have been deemed new and startling, that language furnishes the principal means of fruitful inquiry into the ​deeds and fates of mankind during the ages which precede direct historical record. It enables us to determine, in the main, both the fact and the degree of relationship subsisting among the different divisions of mankind, and thus to group them together into families, the members of which must have once set forth from a common home, with a common character and a common culture, however widely separated, and however unlike in manners and institutions, we may find them to be, when they first come forth into the light of written history. Upon the study of language is mainly founded the science of ethnology, the science which investigates the genealogy of nations. I say, mainly founded, without wishing to depreciate the claims of physical science in this regard: the relation between linguistic and physical science, and their joint and respective value to ethnology, will be made the subject of discussion at a point further on in our inquiries. But language is also pregnant with information respecting races which lies quite beyond the reach of physical science: it bears within itself plain evidences of mental and moral character and capacity, of degree of culture attained, of the history of knowledge, philosophy, and religious opinion, of intercourse among peoples, and even of the physical circumstances by which those who speak it have been surrounded. It is, in brief, a volume of the most varied historical information to those who know how to read it and to derive the lessons it teaches.
To survey the whole vast field of linguistic science, taking even a rapid view of all the facts it embraces and the results derived from their examination, is obviously beyond our power in a brief series of lectures like the present. I shall not, accordingly, attempt a formally systematic presentation of the subject, laying out its different departments and defining their limits and mutual relations. It will, I am persuaded, be more for our profit to discuss in a somewhat general and familiar way the fundamental facts in the life of language, those which exhibit most clearly its character, and determine the method of its study. We shall thus gain an insight into the nature of linguistic evidence, see how it is elicited from the material containing it, and what and how ​it has force to prove. We shall, in short, endeavour to arrive at an apprehension of the fundamental principles of the science. But we shall also find occasion to glance at the main results accomplished by its means, seeking to understand what language is and what is its value to man, and to recognize the great truths in human history which it has been instrumental in establishing.
In order to these ends, we shall first take up one or two preliminary questions, the discussion of which will show us how language lives and grows, and how it is to be investigated, and will guide us to an understanding of the place which its study occupies among the sciences. We shall then go on to a more detailed examination and illustration of the processes of linguistic growth, and of the manner in which they produce the incessant changes of form and content which language is everywhere and always undergoing. We shall note, further, the various causes which affect the kind and rate of linguistic change. The result of these processes of growth, in bringing about the separation of languages into dialects, will next engage our attention. This will prepare us for a construction of the group of dialects, and the family of more distantly related languages, of which our own English speech is a member, and for an examination and estimate of the evidence which proves them related. The extent and importance, historical and linguistic, of this family will be set forth, and its course of development briefly sketched. 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. And a recognition of the aid which it receives in this last respect from written and recorded speech will lead us, by way of appendix, to take a cursory ​view of the historical development of the art of writing.
The method which we shall follow will be, as much as possible, the analytic rather than the synthetic, the inquiring rather than the dogmatic. We shall strive, above all things, after clearness, and shall proceed always from that which is well-known or obvious to that which is more recondite and obscure, establishing principles by induction from facts which lie within the cognizance of every well-educated person. For this reason, our examples, whether typical or illustrative, will be especially sought among the phenomena of our own familiar idiom; since every living and growing language has that within it which exemplifies the essential facts and principles belonging to all human speech. We shall also avoid, as far as is practicable, the use of figurative, metaphysical, or technical phraseology, endeavouring to talk the language of plain and homely fact. Not a little of the mystery and obscurity which, in the minds of many, invest the whole subject of language, is due to the common employment respecting it of terms founded on analogies instead of facts, and calling up the things they represent surrounded and dimmed by a halo of fancy, instead of presenting sharply cut outlines and distinct lineaments.
The whole subject of linguistic investigation may be conveniently summed up in the single inquiry, "Why do we speak as we do?" The essential character of the study of language, as distinguished from the study of languages, lies in this, that it seeks everywhere, not the facts, but the reasons of them; it asks, not how we speak, or should speak, but for what reason; pursuing its search for reasons back to the very ultimate facts of human history, and down into the very depths of human nature. To cover the whole ground of investigation by this inquiry, it needs to be proposed in more than one sense; as the most fitting introduction to our whole discussion, let us put it first in its plainest and most restricted meaning: namely, why do we ourselves speak the English as our mother-tongue, or native language, instead of any other of the thousand varying forms of speech current among men? It is indeed a simple question, but to ​answer it distinctly and truly will lay the best possible foundation for our further progress, clearing our way of more than one of the imperfect apprehensions, or the misapprehensions, which are apt to encumber the steps of students of language.
The general answer is so obvious as hardly to require to be pointed out: we speak English because we were taught it by those who surrounded us in our infancy and growing age. It is our mother-tongue, because we got it from the lips of our mother; it is our native language, inasmuch as we were born, not indeed into the possession of it, but into the company of those who already spoke it, having learned it in the same way before us. We were not left to our own devices, to work out for ourselves the great problem of how to talk. In our case, there was no development of language out of our own internal resources, by the reflection of phenomena in consciousness, or however else we may choose to describe it; by the action of a natural impulse, shaping ideas, and creating suitable expression for them. No sooner were our minds so far matured as to be capable of intelligently associating an idea and its sign, than we learned, first to recognize the persons and things about us, the most familiar acts and phenomena of our little world, by the names which others applied to them, and then to apply to them the same names ourselves. Thus, most of us learned first of all to stammer the childish words for 'father' and 'mother,' put, for our convenience, in the accents easiest for unpractised lips to frame. Then, as we grew on, we acquired daily more and more, partly by direct instruction, partly by imitation: those who had the care of us contracted their ideas and simplified their speech to suit our weak capacities; they watched with interest every new vocable which we mastered, corrected our numberless errors, explained what we but half understood, checked us when we used longer words and more ambitious phrases than we could employ correctly or wield adroitly, and drilled us in the utterance of sounds which come hard to the beginner. The kind and degree of the training thus given, indeed, varied greatly in different cases, as did the provision made for the necessary wants of ​childhood in respect to other matters; as, for instance, the food, the dress, the moral nurture. Just as some have to rough their way by the hardest through the scenes of early life, beaten, half-starved, clad in scanty rags, while yet some care and provision were wholly indispensable, and no child could have lived through infancy without them—so, as concerns language, some get but the coarsest and most meagre instruction, and yet instruction enough to help them through the first stages of learning how to speak. In the least favourable circumstances, there must have been constantly about every one of us in our earliest years an amount and style of speech surpassing our acquirements and beyond our reach, and our acquisition of language consisted in our appropriating more and more of this, as we were able. In proportion as our minds grew in activity and power of comprehension, and our knowledge increased, our notions and conceptions were brought into shapes mainly agreeing with those which they wore in the minds of those around us, and received in our usage the appellations to which the latter were accustomed. On making acquaintance with certain liquids, colourless or white, we had not to go through a process of observation and study of their properties, in order to devise suitable titles for them; we were taught that these were water and milk. The one of them, when standing stagnant in patches, or rippling between green banks, we learned to call, according to circumstances and the preference of our instructors, pool or puddle, and brook or river. An elevation rising blue in the distance, or towering nearer above us, attracted our attention, and drew from us the staple inquiry "What is that?"—the answer, "A mountain," or "A hill," brought to our vocabulary one of the innumerable additions which it gained in a like way. Along with the names of external sensible objects, we thus learned also that practical classification of them which our language recognizes; we learned to distinguish brook and river; hill and mountain; tree, bush, vine, shrub, and plant; and so on, in cases without number. In like manner, among the various acts which we were capable of performing, we were taught to designate certain ones by specific titles: much reproof, ​for instance, doubtless made us early understand what was meant by cry, strike, push, kick, bite, and other names for misdeeds incident to even the best-regulated childhood. How long our own mental states might have remained a confused and indistinct chaos to our unassisted reflection, we do not know; but we were soon helped to single out and recognize by appropriate appellations certain ones among them: for example, a warm feeling of gratification and attachment we were made to signify by the expression love; an inferior degree of the same feeling by like; and their opposite by hate. Long before any process of analysis and combination carried on within ourselves would have given us the distinct conceptions of true and false, of good and naughty, they were carefully set before us, and their due apprehension was enforced by faithful admonition, or by something yet more serious. And not only were we thus assisted to an intelligent recognition of ourselves and the world immediately about us, but knowledge began at once to be communicated to us respecting things beyond our reach. The appellations of hosts of objects, of places, of beings, which we had not seen, and perhaps have not even yet seen, we learned by hearing or by reading, and direct instruction enabled us to attach to them some characteristic idea, more or less complete and adequate. Thus, we had not to cross the ocean, and to coast about and traverse a certain island beyond it, in order to know that there is a country England, and to hold it apart, by specific attributes, from other countries of which we obtained like knowledge by like means.
But enough of this illustration. It is already sufficiently clear that the acquisition of language was one of the steps of our earliest education. We did not make our own tongue, or any part of it; we neither selected the objects, acts, mental states, relations, which should be separately designated, nor devised their distinctive designations. We simply received and appropriated, as well as we could, whatever our instructors were pleased to set before us. Independence of the general usages of speech was neither encouraged nor tolerated in us; nor did we feel tempted toward independence. Our object was to communicate with those among ​whom our lot was cast, to understand them and be understood by them, to learn what their greater wisdom and experience could impart to us. In order to this, we had to think and talk as they did, and we were content to do so. Why such and such a combination of sounds was applied to designate such and such an idea was to us a matter of utter indifference; all we knew or cared to know was that others so applied it. Questions of etymology, of fitness of appellation, concerned us not. What was it to us, for instance, when the answer came back to one of our childish inquiries after names, that the word mountain was imported into our tongue out of the Latin, through the Norman French, and was originally an adjective, meaning 'hilly, mountainous,' while hill had once a g in it, indicating its relationship with the adjective high? We recognized no tie between any word and the idea represented by it excepting a mental association which we had ourselves formed, under the guidance, and in obedience to the example, of those about us. We do, indeed, when a little older, perhaps, begin to amuse ourselves with inquiring into the reasons why this word means that thing, and not otherwise: but it is only for the satisfaction of our curiosity; if we fail to find a reason, or if the reason be found trivial and insufficient, we do not on that account reject the word. Thus every vocable was to us an arbitrary and conventional sign; arbitrary, because any one of a thousand other vocables could have been just as easily learned by us and associated with the same idea; conventional, because the one we acquired had its sole ground and sanction in the consenting usage of the community of which we formed a part.
Race and blood, it is equally evident, had nothing to do directly with determining our language. English descent would never have made us talk English. No matter who were our ancestors; if those about us had said wasser and milch, or eau and lait, or hūdōr and gala, instead of water and milk, we should have done the same. We could just as readily have accustomed ourselves to say lieben or aimer or philein, as love, wahrheit or vérité or alētheia, as truth. And so in every other case. An American or English mother, ​anxious that her child should grow up duly accomplished, gives it a French nurse, and takes care that no English be spoken in its presence; and not all the blood of all the Joneses can save it from talking French first, as if this were indeed its own mother-tongue. An infant is taken alive from the arms of its drowned mother, the only waif cast upon the shore from the wreck of a strange vessel; and it learns the tongue of its foster-parents; no outbreak of natural and hereditary speech ever betrays from what land it derived its birth. The child of a father and mother of different race and speech learns the tongue of either, as circumstances and their choice may determine; or it learns both, and is equally at home in them, hardly knowing which to call its native language. The bands of Africans, stolen from their homes and imported into America, lost in a generation their Congo or Mendi, and acquired from their fellow-slaves a rude jargon in which they could communicate with one another and with their masters. The Babel of dialects brought every year to our shores by the thousands of foreigners who come to seek a new home among us, disappear in as brief a time, or are kept up only where those who speak them herd together in separate communities. The Irish peasantry, mingled with and domineered over by English colonists, governed under English institutions, feeling the whole weight, for good and for evil, of a superior English civilization, incapacitated from rising above a condition of poverty and ignorance without command of English speech, unlearn by degrees their native Celtic tongue, and adopt the dialect of the ruling and cultivated class.
No one, I am confident, can fail to allow that this is a true account of the process by which we acquire our "mother-tongue." Every one recognizes, as the grand advantage connected with the use of language, the fact that in it and by it whatever of truth and knowledge each generation has learned or worked out can be made over into the possession of the generation following. It is not necessary that each of us study the world for himself, in order to apprehend and classify the varied objects it contains, with their qualities and relations, and invent designations for them. This has ​been done by those who came before us, and we enter into the fruits of their labours. It is only the first man, before whom every beast of the field and every fowl of the air must present itself, to see what he will call it; whatever he calls any living creature, that is the name thereof, not to himself alone, but to his family and descendants, who are content to style each as their father had done before them
Our acquisition of English, however, has as yet been but partially and imperfectly described.
In the first place, the English which we thus learn is of that peculiar form or local variety which is talked by our instructors and models. It is, indeed, possible that one may have been surrounded from birth by those, and those only, whose speech is wholly conformed to perfect standards; then it will have been, at least, his own fault if he has learned aught but the purest and most universally accepted English. But such cases cannot be otherwise than rare. For, setting aside the fact that all are not agreed as to whose usage forms the unexceptionable standard, nothing can be more certain than that few, on either side of the ocean, know and follow it accurately. Not many of us can escape acquiring in our youth some tinge of local dialect, of slang characteristic of grade or occupation, of personal peculiarities, even, belonging to our initiators into the mysteries of speech. These may be mere inelegancies of pronunciation, appearing in individual words or in the general tone of utterance, like the nasal twang, and the flattening of ou into ău, which common fame injuriously ascribes to the Yankee; or they may be ungrammatical modes of expression, or uncouth turns and forms of construction; or favourite recurrent phrases, such as I guess, I calculate, I reckon, I expect, you know, each of which has its own region of prevalence; or colloquialisms and vulgarisms, which ought to hide their heads in good English society; or words of only dialectic currency, which the general language does not recognize. Any or all of these or of their like we innocently learn along with the rest of our speech, not knowing how to distinguish the evil from the good. And often, as some of us know to our cost, errors and infelicities are thus so thoroughly ​wrought into our minds, as parts of our habitual modes of expression, that not all the care and instruction of after life can rid us of them. How many men of culture and eminent ability do we meet with, who exhibit through life the marks of a defective or vicious early training in their native tongue! The dominion of habit is not less powerful in language than in anything else that we acquire and practise. It is not alone true that he who has once thoroughly learned English is thereby almost disqualified from ever attaining a native facility, correctness, and elegance in any foreign tongue; one may also so thoroughly learn a bad style of English as never to be able to ennoble it into the best and most approved form of his native speech. Yet, with us, the influences which tend to repress and eradicate local peculiarities and individual errors are numerous and powerful. One of the most effective among them is school instruction. It is made an important part of our education to learn to speak and write correctly. The pupil of a faithful and competent instructor is taught to read and pronounce, to frame sentences with the mouth and with the pen, in a manner accordant with that which is accepted among the well-educated everywhere. Social intercourse is a cultivating agency hardly less important, and more enduring in its action; as long as we live, by associating with those who speak correctly, we are shown our own faults, and at the same time prompted and taught to correct them. Reading—which is but another form of such intercourse—consultation of authorities, self-impelled study in various forms, help the work. Our speech is improved and perfected, as it was first acquired, by putting ourselves in the position of learners, by following the example of those who speak better than we do. He who is really in earnest to complete his mastery of his mother-tongue may hope for final success, whatever have been his early disadvantages; just as one may acquire a foreign tongue, like German or French, with a degree of perfection depending only on his opportunities, his capacity, his industry, and the length of time he devotes to the study.
Again, even when the process of training which we have ​described gives general correctness and facility, it is far from conferring universal command of the resources of the English tongue. This is no grand indivisible unity, whereof the learner acquires all or none; it is an aggregation of particulars, and each one appropriates more or less of them, according to his means and ability. The vocabulary which the young child has acquired the power to use is a very scanty one; it includes only the most indispensable part of speech, names for the commonest objects, the most ordinary and familiar conceptions, the simplest relations. You can talk with a child only on a certain limited range of subjects; a book not written especially for his benefit is in great part unintelligible to him: he has not yet learned its signs for thought, and they must be translated into others with which he is acquainted; or the thought itself is beyond the reach of his apprehension, the statement is outside the sphere of his knowledge. But in this regard we are all of us more or less children. Who ever yet got through learning his mother-tongue, and could say, "The work is done?" The encyclopedic English language, as we may term it, the English of the great dictionaries, contains more than a hundred thousand words. And these are only a selection out of a greater mass. If all the signs for thought employed for purposes of communication by those who have spoken and who speak no other tongue than ours were brought together, if all obsolete, technical, and dialectic words were gathered in, which, if they are not English, are of no assignable spoken tongue, the number mentioned would be vastly augmented. Out of this immense mass, it has been reckoned by careful observers that from three to five thousand answer all the ordinary ends of familiar intercourse, even among the cultivated; and a considerable portion of the English-speaking community, including the lowest and most ignorant class, never learn to use even so many as three thousand: what they do acquire, of course, being, like the child's vocabulary, the most necessary part of the language, signs for the commonest and simplest ideas. To a nucleus of this character, every artisan, though otherwise uninstructed, must add the technical language of his own craft—names for tools, and ​processes, and products which his every-day experience makes familiar to him, but of which the vast majority, perhaps, of those outside his own line of life know nothing. Ignorant as he may be, he will talk to you of a host of matters which you shall not understand. No insignificant part of the hundred-thousand-word list is made up of selections from such technical vocabularies. Each department of labour, of art, of science, has its special dialect, fully known only to those who have made themselves masters in that department. The world requires of every well-informed and educated person a certain amount of knowledge in many special departments, along with a corresponding portion of the language belonging to each: but he would be indeed a marvel of many-sided learning who had mastered them all. Who is there among us that will not find, on every page of the comprehensive dictionaries now in vogue, words which are strange to him, which need defining to his apprehension, which he could not be sure of employing in the right place and connection? And this, not in the technical portions only of our vocabulary. There are words, or meanings of words, no longer in familiar use, antiquated or obsolescent, which yet may not be denied a place in the present English tongue. There are objects which almost never fall under the notice of great numbers of people, or of whole classes of the community, and to whose names, accordingly, when met with, these are unable to attach any definite idea. There are cognitions, conceptions, feelings, which have not come up in the minds of all, which all have not had occasion and acquired power to express. There are distinctions, in every department of thought, which all have not learned to draw and designate. Moreover, there are various styles of expression for the same thing, which are not at every one's command. One writer or speaker has great ease and copiousness of diction; for all his thoughts he has a variety of phrases to choose among; he lays them out before us in beautiful elaboration, in clear and elegant style, so that to follow and understand him is like floating with the current. Another, with not less wealth of knowledge and clearness of judgment, is cramped and awkward in his use of language; ​he puts his ideas before us in a rough and fragmentary way; he carries our understandings with him, but only at the cost of labour and pains on our part. And though he may be able to comprehend all that is said by the other, he has not in the same sense made the language his own, any more than the student of a foreign tongue who can translate from it with facility, but can express himself in it only lamely. Thus the infinite variety of the native and acquired capacity of different individuals comes to light in their idiom. It would be as hard to find two persons with precisely the same limits to their speech, as with precisely the same lineaments of countenance.
Once more, not all who speak the same tongue attach the same meaning to the words they utter. We learn what words signify either by direct definition or by inference from the circumstances in which they are used. But no definition is or can be exact and complete; and we are always liable to draw wrong inferences. Children, as every one knows, are constantly misapprehending the extent of meaning and application of the signs they acquire. Until it learns better, a child calls every man papa; having been taught the word sky, it calls the ceiling of a room the sky; it calls a donkey or a mule a horse—and naturally enough, since it has had to apply the name dog to creatures differing far more than these from one another. And so long as the learning of language lasts, does the liability to such error continue. It is a necessity of the case, arising out of the essential nature of language. Words are not exact models of ideas; they are merely signs for ideas, at whose significance we arrive as well as we can; and no mind can put itself into such immediate and intimate communion with another mind as to think and feel precisely with it. Sentences are not images of thoughts, reflected in a faultless mirror; nor even photographs, needing only to have the colour added: they are but imperfect and fragmentary sketches, giving just outlines enough to enable the sense before which they are set up to seize the view intended, and to fill it out to a complete picture; while yet, as regards the completeness of the filling out, the details of the work, ​and the finer shades of colouring, no two minds will produce pictures perfectly accordant with one another, nor will any precisely reproduce the original.
The limits of variation of meaning are, of course, very different in different classes of words. So far as these are designations of definite objects, cognizable by the senses, there is little danger of our seriously misapprehending one another when we utter them. Yet, even here, there is room for no trifling discordance, as the superior knowledge or more vivid imagination of one person gives to the idea called up by a name a far richer content than another can put into it. Two men speak of the sun, with mutual intelligence: but to the one he is a mere ball of light and heat, which rises in the sky every morning, and goes down again at night; to the other, all that science has taught us respecting the nature of the great luminary, and its influence upon our little planet, is more or less distinctly present every time he utters its name. The word Pekin is spoken before a number of persons, and is understood by them all: but some among them know only that it is the name of an immense city in Asia, the capital of the Chinese empire; others have studied Chinese manners and customs, have seen pictures of Chinese scenery, architecture, dress, occupation, and are able to tinge the conception which the word evokes with some fair share of a local colouring; another, perhaps, has visited the place, and its name touches a store of memories, and brings up before his mind's eye a picture vivid with the hues of truth. I feel a tolerable degree of confidence that the impressions of colour made on my sense are the same with those made upon my friend's sense, so that, when we use the words red or blue, we do not mean different things: and yet, even here, it is possible that one of us may be afflicted with some degree of colour-blindness, so that we do not apprehend the same shades precisely alike. But just so is every part of language liable to be affected by the personality of the speaker; and most of all, where matters of more subjective apprehension are concerned, The voluptuary, the passionate and brutal, the philosophic, and the sentimental, for instance, when they speak of love or of hate, ​mean by no means the same feelings. How pregnant with sacred meaning are home, patriotism, faith to some, while others utter or hear them with cool indifference! It is needless, however, to multiply examples. Not half the words in our familiar speech would be identically defined by any considerable number of those who employ them every day. Nay, who knows not that verbal disputes, discussions turning on the meaning of words, are the most frequent, bitter, and interminable of controversies?
Clearly, therefore, we are guilty of no paradox 1n maintaining that, while we all speak the English language, the English of no two individuals among us is precisely the same: it is not the same in form; it is not the same in extent; it is not the same in meaning.
But what, then, is the English language? We answer: It is the immense aggregate of the articulated signs for thought accepted by, and current among, a certain vast community which we call the English-speaking people, embracing the principal portion of the inhabitants of our own country and of Great Britain, with all those who elsewhere in the world talk like them. It is the sum of the separate languages of all the members of this community. Or—since each one says some things, or says them in a way, not to be accepted as in the highest sense English—it is their average rather than their sum; it is that part of the aggregate which is supported by the usage of the majority; but of a majority made in great part by culture and education, not by numbers alone. It is a mighty region of speech, of somewhat fluctuating and uncertain boundaries, whereof each speaker occupies a portion, and a certain central tract is included in the portion of all: there they meet on common ground; off it, they are strangers to one another. Although one language, it includes numerous varieties, of greatly differing kind and degree: individual varieties, class varieties, local varieties. Almost any two persons who speak it may talk so as to be unintelligible to each other. The one fact which gives it unity is, that all who speak it may, to a considerable extent, and on subjects of the most general and pressing interest, talk so as to understand one another.
​How this language is kept in existence is clearly shown by the foregoing exposition. It is preserved by an uninterrupted tradition. Each generation hands it down to the generation following. Every one is an actor in the process; in each individual speaker the language has, as we may say, a separate and independent existence, as has an animal species in each of its members; and each does what in him lies to propagate it—that is to say, his own part of it, as determined in extent and character by the inherent and acquired peculiarities of his nature. And, small as may be the share of the work which falls to any one of us, the sum of all the shares constitutes the force which effects the transmission of the whole language. In the case of a tongue like ours, too, these private labours are powerfully aided and supplemented by the influence of a literature. Each book is, as it were, an undying individual, with whom, often, much larger numbers hold intercourse than any living person can reach, and who teaches them to speak as he speaks. A great body of literary works of acknowledged merit and authority, in the midst of a people proud and fond of it, is an agent in the preservation and transmission of any tongue, the importance of which cannot easily be over-estimated: we shall have to take it constantly into account in the course of our further inquiries into the history of language. But each work is, after all, only a single person, with his limitations and deficiencies, and with his restricted influence. Even Shakspeare, with his unrivalled wealth and variety of expression, uses but about fifteen thousand words, and Milton little more than half so many—mere fragments of the encyclopedic English tongue. The language would soon be shorn of no small part of its strength, if placed exclusively in the hands of any individual, or of any class. Nothing less than the combined effort of a whole community, with all its classes and orders, in all its variety of characters, circumstances, and necessities, is capable of keeping in life a whole language.
But, while our English speech is thus passed onward from generation to generation of those who learn to speak it, and, having learned themselves, teach others, it does not remain ​precisely the same; on the contrary, it is undergoing all the time a slow process of modification, which is capable of rendering it at length another language, unintelligible to those who now employ it. In order to be convinced of this, we have only to cast an eye backward over its past history, during the period for which we have its progress recorded in contemporary documents. How much is there in our present familiar speech which would be strange and meaningless to one of Elizabeth's court! How much, again, do we find in any of the writers of that period—in Shakspeare, for instance—which is no longer good current English! phrases and forms of construction which never fall from our lips now save as we quote them; scores of words which we have lost out of memory, or do not employ in the sense which they then bore. Go back yet farther, from half-century to half-century, and the case grows rapidly worse; and when we arrive at Chaucer and Gower, who are separated from us by a paltry interval of five hundred years, only fifteen or twenty descents from father to son, we meet with a dialect which has a half-foreign look, and can only be read by careful study, with the aid of a glossary. Another like interval of five hundred years brings us to the Anglo-Saxon of King Alfred, which is absolutely a strange tongue to us, not less unintelligible than the German of the present day, and nearly as hard to learn. And yet, we have no reason to believe that any one of those thirty or forty generations of Englishmen through whom we are descended from the contemporaries of King Alfred was less simply and single-mindedly engaged to transmit to its children the same language which it had received from its ancestors than is the generation of which we ourselves form a part. It may well be that circumstances were less favourable to some of them than to us, and that our common speech stands in no danger of suffering in the next thousand years a tithe of the change which it has suffered in the past thousand. But the forces which are at work in it are the same now that they have always been, and the effects they are producing are of the same essential character: both are inherent in the nature of ​language, and inseparable from its use. This will be made plain to us by a brief inquiry.
The most rapid and noticeable mode of change in our language is that which is all the time varying the extent and meaning of its vocabulary. English speech exists in order that we may communicate with one another respecting those things which we know. As the stock of words at the command of each individual is an approximate measure of the sum of his knowledge, so the stock of words composing a language corresponds to what is known in the community; the objects it is familiar with, the distinctions it has drawn, all its cognitions and reasonings, in the world of matter and of mind, must have their appropriate expression. That speech should signify more than is in the minds of its speakers is obviously impossible; but neither must it fall short of indicating what they think. Now the sum of knowledge in every community varies not a little from generation to generation. Every trade and handicraft, every art, every science, is constantly changing its materials, its processes, and its products; and its technical dialect is modified accordingly, while so much of the results of this change as affects or interests the general public finds its way into the familiar speech of everybody. As our material condition varies, as our ways of life, our institutions, private and public, become other than they have been, all is necessarily reflected in our language. In these days of railroads, steamboats, and telegraphs, of sun-pictures, of chemistry and geology, of improved wearing stuffs, furniture, styles of building, articles of food and luxury of every description, how many words and phrases are in every one's mouth which would be utterly unintelligible to the most learned man of a century ago, were he to rise from his grave and walk our streets! It is, of course, in its stores of expression for these more material objects and relations, and for the details of technical knowledge, that language changes most notably, because it is with reference to these that the necessity for change especially arises. The central and most indispensable substance of every language is made up of designations for things, properties, acts, the ​apprehension of which is nearly as old as humanity itself, which men learned to name as soon as they learned to talk at all, and whose names are not liable to pass away or become superseded. The words red, green, blue, yellow, or their equivalents, go back to the earliest period of human speech; it is when some new and delicate shades of colour, like the aniline dyes, are invented, that appellations must be sought for them, and may be found even among names of localities, as Magenta, Solferino, to which the circumstances of the time have given a sudden notoriety. Any two rustics, from the time of Adam to the present, could talk with one another, with all the particularity which their practical ends required, of earth and rock, of pebbles and stones, of sand and gravel, of loam and clay: but, since the beginning of the present century, the mineralogist and geologist have elicited a host of new facts touching the history and constitution of the earth's crust and the materials of which this is made up, have arranged and classified its strata and their contents, have brought to light numberless relations, of cause and effect, of succession, of origin, date, and value, which had hitherto lain hidden in it; and, to express these, they have introduced into English speech a whole technical vocabulary, and one which is still every year extending and changing. So it is with botany; so with metaphysics; so with every other branch of science and art. And though the greater part of the technical vocabularies remains merely technical, understood and employed only by special students in each branch, yet the common speech is not entirely unaffected by them. Some portion of the results of the advancement in knowledge made by the wise and learned reaches even the lowest, or all but the very lowest, and is expressed in their language; and it thus becomes a part of the fundamental stock of ideas which constitute the heritage of each generation, which every child is taught to form and use. Language, in short, is expanded and contracted in precise adaptation to the circumstances and needs of those who use it; it is enriched or impoverished, in every part, along with the enrichment or impoverishment of their minds.
This is, as I have said, the most noticeable mode of change ​in language, and also the most natural, inevitable, and legitimate. Even the bigoted purist cannot object to it, or wish it otherwise: conservatism here would be the conservatism of ignorance, opposing itself to the progress of civilization and enlightenment. Along with it, too, comes its natural counterpart, the dropping out of use and out of memory of words and meanings of words and phrases which circumstances have made it no longer desirable to maintain in existence; which denote the things of a by-gone time, or, by the substitution of more acceptable expressions, have become unnecessary and otiose.
But there are also all the time going on in our language changes of another and a more questionable character, changes which affect the form rather than the content of speech, and are in a sense unnecessary, and therefore stoutly opposed by the authority of exact tradition; yet which have hitherto shown themselves not less inevitable than the others. We have seen that the transmission of language is by tradition. But traditional transmission is by its inherent nature defective. If a story cannot pass a few times from mouth to mouth and maintain its integrity, neither can a word pass from generation to generation and keep its original form. Very young children, as every one knows, so mutilate their words and phrases that only those who are most familiar with them can understand what they say. But even an older child, who has learned to speak in general with tolerable correctness, has a special inaptness to utter a particular sound, and either drops it altogether or puts another and nearly related one in its place. There are certain combinations of consonants which it cannot manage, and has to mouth over into more pronounceable shape. It drops a syllable or two from a long and cumbrous word. It omits endings and confounds forms together: me, for instance, has to do duty in its usage for me, my, and I; and eat, to stand for all persons, tenses, and numbers of the verb. Or, again, having learned by prevailing experience that the past sense in a verb is signified by the addition of a d, it imagines that, because it says I loved, it must also say I bringed; or else, perhaps, remembering I sang from I sing, it says I brang. ​It says foots and mouses; it says gooder and goodest; it confounds sit and set, lie and lay (in which last blunders, unfortunately, it is supported by the example of too many among the grown-up and educated). Care, on its own part and on that of its instructors, corrects by degrees such childish errors; but this care is often wanting or insufficient, and it grows up continuing still to speak bad English. Moreover, as we have already seen, not each child only, but each man, to his dying day, is a learner of his native tongue; nor is there any one who is not liable, from carelessness or defective instruction, to learn a word or phrase incorrectly, or to reproduce it inaccurately. For these reasons there always lies, in full vigour and currency, in the lower strata of language-users, as we may term them—among the uneducated or half-educated—a great host of deviations from the best usage, offences against the propriety of speech, kept down in the main by the controlling influence of good speakers, yet all the time threatening to rise to the surface, and now and then succeeding in forcing their way up, and compelling recognition and acceptance from even the best authorities.
Of this origin are the class of changes in language which we are at present considering. They are, in their inception, inaccuracies of speech. They attest the influence of that immense numerical majority among the speakers of English who do not take sufficient pains to speak correctly, but whose blunders become finally the norm of the language. They are mainly the results of two tendencies, already illustrated in the instances we have given: first, to make things easy to our organs of speech, to economize time and effort in the work of expression; second, to get rid of irregular and exceptional forms, by extending the prevailing analogies of the language. Let us look at a few examples.
Our written words are thickly sown with silent letters, which, as every one knows, are relics of former modes of pronunciation, once necessary constituents of spoken language, but gradually dropped, because it was easier to do without them. Instances are knight, calm, psalm, would, doubt, plough, thought, sword, chestnut. If we will but carry ​our investigations further back, beyond the present written form of our words, we shall light upon much more extraordinary cases of mutilation and abbreviation. Thus, to take but a single, though rather striking, example, our alms is the scanty relic of the long Greek vocable eleēmosumē. All the monosyllables, in fact, of which especially the Anglo-Saxon portion of our daily speech is in so great measure composed, are relics of long polysyllabic forms, usual at an earlier stage of the language. Some words are but just through, or even now passing through, a like process. In often and soften, good usage has taken sides with the corruption which has ejected the t, and accuses of being old-fashioned or affectedly precise the large and respectable class who still pronounce that letter; while, on the other hand, it clings to the t of captain, and stigmatizes as vulgar those who presume to say cap'n.
Again, it is the prevailing English custom to accent a noun of two syllables on its first syllable; hosts of nouns of French origin have had their native accent altered, in order to conform them to this analogy. Such changes have been going on at every period in the history of our tongue: in Pope, in Milton, in Shakspeare, in Chaucer, you will find examples of their action, in ever increasing numbers as you go backward from the present time. Nor are they yet over: there is ally, which all the authorities agree in pronouncing allý, while prevailing popular usage, on both sides of the Atlantic, persists in favouring álly; and it is not unlikely that, in the end, the people will prove too strong for the orthoëpists, as they have done so many times before.
When our Bible translation was made, the verb speak had a proper imperfect form, spake: a well-educated Englishman would no more have written he spoke than he come and done it. But, just as the ill-instructed and the careless now-a-days are often guilty of these last two blunders, so then, undoubtedly, large numbers habitually said spoke for spake; until, at last, the struggle against it was given up as hopeless; and no one now says I spake save in conscious imitation of Biblical style.
At the same period, but two centuries and a half ago, the ​English language contained no such word as its. His had been, in the old Anglo-Saxon and ever since, the common possessive of he and it (A.-S., hit); it belonged to the latter no less than to the former. But almost all the possessive cases in the language were formed by adding s to the nominative, and his wore the aspect of being so formed from he, and of having nothing to do with it. Why not, then, form a new possessive in like manner for it itself? Th1s was a question which very probably suggested itself to a great many minds about the same time, and the word its may have sprung up in a hundred places at once, and propagated itself, under the ban of the purists of the day, who frowned upon it, pronounced it "as bad as she's, for her, would be," and carefully avoided its use; until at last its popularity and evident desirableness caused it to be universally adopted and recognized as proper. And, at the present time, few of us read our Bibles so curiously as to have discovered that they contain no such word as its, from Genesis to Revelation.
The Anglo-Saxon employed ye (ge) as subject of a verb, and you (eow) as object, and the early English was careful to make the same distinction. Nor is it yet entirely lost; but the use of ye now belongs to a solemn style only, and you has been set up as subject not less than object. There was a time when you are for ye are, and yet more for thou art, would have been as offensive to the ear of a correct English speaker as is now the thee is of the Quaker.
Not a few of the irregular verbs which our language formerly contained have been in later usage assimilated to the more numerous class, and conjugated regularly. Take as examples help, of which the ancient participle holpen, instead of helped, is found still in our Bibles; and work, which has gained a modern preterit and participle, worked, although the older form, wrought, is also retained in use, with a somewhat altered and specialized signification.
Here are changes of various kind and value, though all tracing their origin to the same tendencies. Words change their shape without losing their identity; old forms, old ​marks of distinction, are neglected and lost: some of these could well be spared, but others were valuable, and their relinquishment has impaired the power of expression of the language; while new forms are created, and new marks of distinction are adopted into general use, and made part and parcel of English speech.
So full and abundant illustration of this department of change in language as might be desired cannot be drawn from facts with which we are all familiar, because, for some time past, the conservative forces have been so powerful in our mother-tongue, and the accuracy of historical transmission so strict, that what is now good English has, in the main, long been such, and is likely long to continue such. Its alteration goes on so slowly that we hardly perceive it in progress, and it is only as we compare the condition of the language at a given time with that which it shows at the distance of a considerable interval, earlier or later, that they come clearly to light. The English is, indeed, among all cultivated tongues, the one which has suffered, under the influences which we have been describing, the most thorough and pervading change of its grammar and vocabulary; but the greater part of this change occurred at a certain definite period, and from the effect of circumstances which are well known. Our English ancestors, between the time of Alfred and that of Chaucer, endured the irruption and conquest of a French-speaking people, the Normans—just as did the Irish, at a later day, that of the English. That the Saxons did not, like the Irish, gradually relinquish their own tongue, and learn to talk French altogether, was owing to their advanced culture and superior independence of character: after a long time of confusion and mutual unintelligibility, as every one knows, the Saxons gave up a part of their vocabulary for that of the Normans, and the Normans a part of theirs, with nearly all their grammar, for those of the Saxons, and our present composite dialect, with its meagre system of grammatical inflections, was the result. 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.
The facts and conditions which we have been considering are of no exceptional character: on the contrary, they are common to all the forms of speech current among the sons of men. Throughout the world, the same description, in its essential features, will be found to hold good. Every spoken language is a congeries of individual signs, called words; and each word (with the rare exception of the actual additions made by individuals to language, of which we shall take account later) was learned by every person who employs it from some other person who had employed it before him. He adopted it as the sign of a certain idea, because it was already in use by others as such. Inner and essential connection between idea and word, whereby the mind which conceives the one at once apprehends and produces the other, there is none, in any language upon earth. Every existing form of human speech is a body of arbitrary and conventional signs for thought, handed down by tradition from one generation to another, no individual in any generation receiving or transmitting the whole body, but the sum of the separate givings and takings being effective to keep it in existence without essential loss. Yet the process of traditional transmission always has been, is now, and will ever continue to be, in all parts of the world, an imperfect one: no language remains, or can remain, the same during a long period of time. Growth and change make the life of language, as they are everywhere else the inseparable accompaniment and sign of life. A language is living, when it is the instrument of thought of a whole people, the wonted means of expression of all their feelings, experiences, opinions, reasonings; when the connection between it and their mental activity is so close that the one reflects the other, and that the two grow together, the instrument ever adapting itself to the uses which it is to subserve. The ways in which this adaptation takes place, and the causes which ​accelerate or retard the inevitable change of language, have been already in part glanced at, and will come up for more detailed examination hereafter; it is sufficient at present that we fully recognize the fact of change. It is the fundamental fact upon which rests the whole method of linguistic study.