Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume X.djvu/152

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146 LANGUAGE Sussex according to others, about 1160, died in Slindon, Sussex, July 9, 1228. He was edu- cated at the university of Paris, where he had for a fellow student Innocent III., and eventu- ally became canon of Notre Dame and chancel- lor of the university. Visiting Kome in 1206, he was made a cardinal by Innocent III., and in< the succeeding year was consecrated by him archbishop of Canterbury, to which see he had been elected at the recommendation of the pope, and in opposition to the claims of John de Gray, whom King John had compelled the monks of Canterbury to elect. This circum- stance gave rise to the quarrel between John and Innocent, one of the consequences of which was that Langton was kept out of his see until the submission of the king to the pope in 1213. In the same year he joined the confederacy of barons opposed to the mis- government of John, and at a meeting of the heads of the revolt in London urged the restoration of the charter of Henry I. His name also stands first among the subscribing witnesses to Magna Charta. He adhered faith- fully to his party throughout the struggle, and for his refusal to excommunicate the barons, at the command of Innocent, was suspended from the exercise of his archiepiscopal func- tions ; but he was restored in February, 1216, and after the accession of Henry III., was al- lowed to resume the administration of his dio- cese. From that period he devoted his whole care to church discipline, and published a code of 42 canons in a synod at Oxford in 1222. He still continued to watch over the two char- ters with the attachment of a parent, and in 1223, at the call of the barons, again placed himself at their head to demand from Henry III. the confirmation of their liberties. His writings have perished ; but to him is due the division of the Bible into chapters, since uni- versally adopted. LANGUAGE (Lat. lingua, tongue), in a general sense, any means of communicating thought. Man commonly accomplishes it through the or- gans of sight and hearing, and when these are impaired through the sense of touch. Visi- ble speech is mainly that of gestures and of wri- ting. Gestures are chiefly used by primitive races with whom language is but little devel- oped, and by cultured people to converse with those who cannot hear. The scientific forms of unspoken language have been described in the articles BLIND, and DEAF AND DUMB. For the unsystematic and pictorial represen- tations of thought, see HIEROGLYPHICS ; and for the various graphic systems, see WRITING. This article treats of language only in the nar- rower and ordinary sense of oral or articulate speech, and specially of the results of the the- oretical study of it. The character and func- tions of the organs of speech are discussed un- der VOICE. Language is most commonly stu- died for practical purposes only, to gain greater assurance and accuracy in the use of one's ver- nacular, or to acquire the use of other tongues which afford commercial, social, or literary advantages. The science of language, how- ever, is not simply the study of a language or of languages. Though in a measure grounded on, and to a high degree aided by, a practical knowledge of languages, the science does not include the art of acquiring and imparting lan- guages, to which the name of linguistics is properly confined. Hence it often happens that a great scholar in the science of language is not also a good linguist, or polyglot. There is another method of studying language which, in a narrower sense, does not come within the province of the science of language, namely, philology. In the narrower limitation of the term, as accepted by many recent writers, phi- lology comprehends only scientific researches into the relations of anything expressed by lan- guage. The study of language is not its object, but simply a means. It uses language only as a key to the social, moral, intellectual, and reli- gious history of mankind, as preserved in the literary monuments of given nations and ages. Thus classical philology inquires into the cul- ture of Greece and Rome only ; oriental philol- ogy investigates that of eastern peoples ; Ger- manic philology studies the Germanic or Teu- tonic races ; and so on. Philology, therefore, is thus not confined by the limits of purely lin- guistic investigation, and is in fact a historical discipline. Many scholars accordingly counsel the disuse of the term " comparative philol- ogy" as a designation for the science of lan- guage. The term "comparative grammar "is also considered inaccurate, as it indicates rather a division of the science of language. Thus linguistics, philology, and the science of lan- guage are conceived as three totally distinct sciences, though of necessity interdependent. Linguistics, as the practical study of languages, dead or living, cannot be treated here, but ref- erence must be made to the numerous articles on the separate languages. Philology, con- ceived as the science of the culture of a given racial or historical division of mankind, is also too vast and varied for detailed treatment here; and its multifarious subjects of study must be consulted in the articles devoted to each. The science of language inquires into the origin of language ; into the laws of the de- velopment of one, or several, or all languages ; into the reasons of the diversities or similari- ties of languages ; into the causes of the gram- matical and syntactical constructions peculiar to each ; and into the relations which various languages hold to each other. The results attained in these classes of inquiries form therefore the subject and order of this arti- cle. The origin of language is still, as Prof. Whitney has expressed it, an uncontrollable subject, and other scholars regard it even as an insoluble problem. Many adhere to the belief that language was specially given by God, and hence that there was originally a single perfect language. Some hold that the statements of the Bible do not require such inference, and