with their Latin, the priests with their Sanskrit — to suggest that there may have been such a tendency. It is part of the thoroughbred's pride to be able to speak to one another in a way that outsiders cannot understand — a language for everybody is a vernacular. To be "on conversational terms with" someone is a privilege or a pretension. So, too, the use of literary language in talking with educated people, and contempt for dialect, mark the true bourgeois pride. It is only we who live in a Civilization wherein it is just as normal for children to learn to write as to learn to walk — in all earlier Cultures it was a rare accomplishment, to which few could aspire. And I am convinced that it was just so once with verbal language.
The tempo of linguistic history is immensely rapid; here a mere century signifies a great deal. I may refer again to the gesture-language of the North Indians,[1] which became necessary because the rapidity of changes in the tribal dialects made intertribal understanding impossible otherwise. Compare, too, the Latin of the recently discovered Forum inscription[2] (about 500) with the Latin of Plautus (about 200) and this again with the Latin of Cicero (about 50). If we assume that the oldest Vedic texts have preserved the linguistic state of 1200 B.C, then even that of 1000 may have differed from it far more completely than any Indogermanic philologists working by a posteriori methods can even surmise.[3] But allegro changes to lento in the moment when script, the language of duration, intervenes and ties down and immobilizes the systems at entirely different age-levels. This is what makes this evolution so opaque to research; all that we possess is remains of written languages. Of the Egyptian and Babylonian linguistic world we do possess originals from as far back as 3000, but the oldest Indogermanic relics are copies, of which the linguistic state is much younger than the contents.
Very various, under all these determinants, have been the destinies of the different grammars and vocabularies. The first attaches to the intellect, the second to things and places. Only grammatical systems are subject to natural inward change. The use of words, on the contrary, psychologically presupposes that, although the expression may change, inner mechanical structure is maintained (and all the more firmly) as being the basis on which denomination essentially rests. The great linguistic families are purely grammatical families. The words in them are more or less homeless and wander from one to another. It is a fundamental error in philological (especially Indogermanic) research that grammar and vocabulary are treated as a unit. All specialist vocabularies — the jargon of hunter, soldier, sportsman, seaman, savant — are in reality only stocks of words, and can be used within any and every grammatical system. The semi-Classical vocabulary of chemistry, the French of diplomacy, and the
