Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/23

LANGUAGE

AND

THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE.

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LECTURE I.

Introductory: history, material, objects of linguistic science; plan of these lectures. Fundamental inquiry. How we acquired our speech, and what it was; differences of individual speech. What is the English language; how kept in existence; its changes. Modes and causes of linguistic change.

Those who are engaged in the investigation of language have but recently begun to claim for their study the rank and title of a science. Its development as such has been wholly the work of the present century, although its germs go back to a much more ancient date. It has had a history, in fact, not unlike that of the other sciences of observation and induction—for example, geology, chemistry, astronomy, physics—which the intellectual activity of modern times has built up upon the scanty observations and crude inductions of other days. Men have always been learning languages, in greater or less measure; adding to their own mother-tongues the idioms of the races about them, for the practical end of communication with those races, of access to their thought and knowledge. There has, too, hardly been a time when some have not been led on from the acquisition of languages to the study of language. The interest of this precious and wonderful possession of man, at once the sign and the means of his superiority to the rest of the animal

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