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LECTURE II.

Nature of the force which produces the changes of language; its modes of action. Language an institution, of historical growth; its study a moral science. Analogies of linguistic sciences with the physical sciences. Its methods historical. Etymology its foundation. Analysis of compound words. Genesis of affixes. Nature of all words as produced by actual composition.

In the preceding lecture, after a very brief survey of the history and objects of linguistic science, we entered upon an inquiry into the means by which we had become possessed of our mother-tongue, an inquiry intended to bring out to our view the mode of transmission and preservation of language in general. And we saw that it is the work of tradition; that each generation passes along to the generation succeeding, with such faithfulness as the nature of the case permits, the store of words, phrases, and constructions which constitute the substance of a spoken tongue. But we also saw that the process of transmission is uniformly an imperfect one; that it never succeeds in keeping any language entirely pure and unaltered: on the contrary, language appeared to us as undergoing, everywhere and always, a slow process of modification, which in course of time effects a considerable change in its constitution, rendering it to all intents and purposes a new tongue. This was illustrated from the history of our English speech, which, by gradual and accumulated alterations made in it, during the past thousand years, by the thirty or forty generations through whose mouths it has passed, has grown from the Anglo-Saxon of King Alfred, through a succession of inter-