the series have compelled me to abbreviate certain parts to which some will perhaps agree with me in wishing that more extension could have been given. Thus, it had been my intention to include in the last chapter a fuller sketch of the history of knowledge and opinion in this department of study. And I have had to leave the text almost wholly without references: although I may here again allege the compendious cast of the work, which renders them little called for; I trust that no injustice will be found to have been done to any. The foundation of my discussion is the now generally accessible facts of language, which are no one man's property more than another's. As for views opposed to my own, while often having them distinctly in mind in their shape as presented by particular scholars, I have hardly ever thought it necessary to report them formally; and I have on principle avoided anything bearing the aspect of personal controversy. NEW HAVEN, April, 1875. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY: THE PROBLEMS OF THE SCIENCE OF LAN GUAGE. Definition of language. Man its universal and sole possessor. Variety of languages. The study of language; aim of this volume. LANGUAGE may be briefly and comprehensively defined as the means of expression of human thought. In a wider and freer sense, everything that bodies forth thought and makes it apprehensible, in whatever way, is called language; and we say, properly enough, that the men of the Middle Ages, for example, speak to us by the great architectural works which they have left behind them, and which tell us very plainly of their genius, their piety, and their valor. But for scientific purposes the term needs restriction, since it would apply else to nearly all human action and product, which discloses the thought that gives it birth. Language, then, signifies rather certain instrumentalities whereby men consciously and with intention represent their thought, to the end, chiefly, of making it known to other men: it is expression for the sake of communication... The instrumentalities capable of being used for this purpose, and actually more or less used, are various: gesture and grimace, pictorial or written signs, and uttered or spoken signs: the first two addressed to the eye, the last to the ear. The first is chiefly employed by mutes-though not in its purity, inasmuch as these unfortunates are wont to be trained and taught by those who speak, and their visible signs are more or less governed by habits born of utterance; going even so far as slavishly to represent the sounds of speech. The second, though in its inception a free and independent means of expression, yet in its historical development becomes linked as a subordinate to speech, and even finds in that subordination its highest perfection and greatest usefulness. The third is, as things actually are in the world, infinitely the most important; insomuch that, in ordinary use, "language" means utterance, and utterance only. And so we shall understand it here: language, for the purposes of this discussion, is the body of uttered and audible signs by which in human society thought is principally expressed, gesture and writing being its subordinates and auxiliaries." 1 Of such spoken and audible means of expression no human community is found destitute. From the highest races to the lowest, all men speak; all are able to interchange such thoughts as they have. Language, then, appears clearly "natural" to man; such are his endowments, such his circumstances, such his history— one or all of these—that it is his invariable possession. Moreover, man is the sole possessor of language. It is true that a certain degree of power of communication, sufficient for the infinitely restricted needs of their gregarious intercourse, is exhibited also by some 1 See the author's "Language and the Study of Language," p. 448 seq.; and his "Oriental and Linguistic Studies," ii. 193-196. 2 Their natural and historical relations will be further treated of in chapter xiv. of the lower animals. Thus, the dog's bark and howl signify by their difference, and each by its various style and tone, very different things; the domestic fowl has a song of quiet enjoyment of life, a clutter of excitement and alarm, a cluck of maternal anticipation or care, a cry of warning-and so on. But these are not only greatly inferior in their degree to human language; they are also so radically diverse in kind from it, that the same name cannot justly be applied to both. Language is one of the most marked and conspicuous, as well as fundamentally characteristic, of the faculties of man. Nevertheless, while human language is thus one as contrasted with brute expression, it is in itself of a variety which is fairly to be termed discordance. It is a congeries of individual languages, separate bodies of audible signs for thought, which, reckoning even those alone of which the speakers are absolutely unintelligible to one another, are very numerous. These languages differ among themselves in every degree. Some are so much alike that their users can with sufficient trouble and care come to understand one another; of others, even a superficial examination shows abundant correspondences; of yet others, similar points of accordance are rarer, and only discoverable by practised study and research; and a great number are to all appearance wholly diverse and often, not only diverse in respect to the actual signs which they use for their various conceptions, but also as to their whole structure, the relations which they signify, the parts of speech they recognize. And this diversity does not accord with differences of intellectual capacity among the speakers: individuals of every degree of gift are found using, each according to his power, the same |