| THE SIGNIFICANCE OF LANGUAGE. |
By MICHEL BRÉAL.
NONE of the works on linguistics which come out one after another, whether for the use of students or of the general public, seem to me to offer exactly what they ought. To one who knows how to question it, language is full of lessons, because man has laid up in it for many centuries the acquisitions of his material and moral life. If only the changes of vowels and consonants are considered, the study is reduced to the proportions of a secondary branch of acoustics and physiology; if the study is directed to the counting of the losses suffered by the grammatical mechanism, it gives the illusion of a building falling to ruin; and if one confines himself to vague theories on the origin of language, he adds a chapter of not much value to the history of systems. It seems to me that there is something else to be done. The extraction from linguistics of what can be drawn from it as food for reflection and as a rule for our own language (since each of us is doing his part in the evolution of human speech) is the thing that should be made most prominent, and that I shall attempt.
My present effort is to study the mental causes which have influenced the transformations of languages. In order to give system to the investigation, I have arrayed the facts under a series of laws—to which term we must not attach an imperative significance, for none of these laws is without exceptions; and I take pains to define for each law the limits within which it is operative. I aim to show that the history of language, besides achieved changes, furnishes numerous cases of attempts that have been carried only part way.
To introduce the will as a factor in the history of language after so much pains have been taken within the past fifty years to exclude it, seems almost like heresy. But while it was proper to discard the puerilities of the science of the past, we have been content to take up with the opposite extreme of a too simple psychology. We shall have to shut our eyes to the evidence to fail to see that an obscure but persevering will presides over changes of language.
How shall this will be represented? I believe it should be represented under the form of thousands and millions and milliards of tentative essays, usually unsuccessful, but sometimes followed by a quarter or a half success, which, thus guided, corrected, and improved upon, at length take some precise direction. The object, in language, is to be understood. The child exercises itself for months in speaking the vowels and articulating the consonants; and how many failures does it make before it clearly pronounces a
