VI
Historic Periods, etc.
The English vocabulary offers a fruitful field of study. First of all, the cast of thought that it expresses is individual. Ours is a distinct, not necessarily superior, civilization; and all the forms of intellectual activity represented by our tongue are so characteristic that one may well believe in the formative influence of a language over the people speaking it.
If we separate our words according to their historic periods, we shall be able to trace in a loose way the spiritual progress of the peoples that used the words. As Hugo says of slang, we may say of our whole vocabulary: To “those who study the tongue as it should be studied, that is to say, as geologists study the earth,” English “appears like a veritable
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