sacrificing a merely personal to a more comprehensive unity, merging the individual in the society of which he is a member. Language is an institution founded in man's social nature, wrought out for the satisfaction of his social wants; and hence, while individuals are the sole ultimate agents in the formation and modification of every word and meaning of a word, it is still the community that makes and changes its language. The one is the molecular force; the other, the organic. Both, as we saw, are always at work, and the history of human tongues is a record of their combined effects; but the individual diversifying forces lie deeper down, are more internal, more inherent in the universal use of speech, and removed from the control of outward circumstances. Language, we may fairly say, tends toward diversity, but circumstances connected with its employment check, annul, and even reverse this tendency, preserving unity, or producing it where it did not before exist.
One or two recent writers upon language[1] have committed the very serious error of inverting the mutual relations of dialectic variety and uniformity of speech, thus turning topsy-turvy the whole history of linguistic development. Unduly impressed by the career of modern cultivated dialects, their effacement of existing dialectic differences and production of homogeneous speech throughout wide regions, and failing to recognize the nature of the forces which have made such a career possible, these authors affirm that the natural tendency of language is from diversity to uniformity; that dialects are, in the regular order of things, antecedent to language; that human speech began its existence in a state of infinite dialectic division, which has been, from the first, undergoing coalescence and reduction. It may seem hardly worth while to spend any effort in refuting an opinion
- ↑ I refer in particular to M. Ernest Renan, of Paris, whose peculiar views upon this subject are laid down in his General History of the Semitic Languages, and more fully in his treatise on the Origin of Language (2nd edition, Paris, 1858, ch. viii.)—a work of great ingenuity and eloquence, but one of which the linguistic philosophy is in a far higher degree constructive than inductive. Professor Max Müller, also, when treating of the Teutonic class of languages (Lectures on Language, first series, fifth lecture), appears distinctly to give in adhesion to the same view.
