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 has ever entered that did not express an observation actually experienced by this people, and, moreover, an observation standing in a connection of wide-spread reciprocal influence with all the other observations of the same people. It does not matter if ever so many individuals of other race and other language are incorporated with the people speaking this language; provided the former are not permitted to bring the sphere of their observations up to the position from which the language is thereafter to develop, they remain dumb in the community and without influence on the language, until the time comes when they themselves have entered into the sphere of observation of the original people. Hence they do not form the language; it is the language which forms them.

52. But the exact opposite of all that has so far been said takes place when a people gives up its own language and adopts a foreign one which is already highly developed as regards the designation of supersensuous things. I do not mean when it yields itself quite freely to the influence of this foreign language and is quite content to remain without a language until it has entered into the circle of observation of this foreign language, but when it forces its own circle of observation on the adopted language, which, when it develops from the position in which they found it, must thenceforward proceed in this circle of observation. In respect of the sensuous part of the language, such an event, indeed, is without consequences. For among every people the children must in any case learn that part of the language just as if the signs were arbitrary, and thus recapitulate in this matter the whole previous linguistic development of the nation. But in this sphere of the senses every sign can be made quite clear by directly looking at or touching the thing