Page:Gurujadalu English.djvu/391

 The following extracts clearly explain the limits within which languages change.

1) “So long as a language is alive, it is constantly changing, so that the grammar and rhetoric of living language can never be absolutely fixed. It is only when the language has ceased to be spoken — has become as we say, a dead language — that fixed rules can be framed which every one who undertakes to write it must observe. The very statement that a language is dead implies that hence-forward no individual or body of persons has power to change it in any particular.” (Words and their ways... In English, Greenrough and Ketredge).

2) “This is the error of the classical creed, to imagine that in a fleeting world, where the quickest eye can never see the same thing twice, and a deed once done can never be repeated, language alone should be capable of fixity and finality. Nature avenges herself on those who could thus make her prisoner, their truths degenerate to truisms, and feeling dies in the ice-palaces that they build to house it. In their search for permanence they become unreal, abstract, didactic, lovers of generalization, cherishers of the dry bones of life; their art is transferred into a science, their expression into an academic terminology. Immutability is their ideal and they find it in the arms of death. Words must change to live, and a word once fixed becomes useless for the purposes of art.” (Walter Reliegh’s Style pp. 40,4 1).

3) “It must once for all be clearly understood that the people can be said to make and change language only in the same sense and insofar as “the people” in a democracy may be said to make and change institutions and laws or insofar as ‘society’ may be said to set and change fashion. This does not mean that all members are actively engaged in it. In all three cases the majority of the people or of society play a passive and, in Tarde’s sense, an imitative