Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/159

IV.] independent significance, and the application of accidental differences to the practical uses of significant distinction. And this external decay and growth is accompanied by, and accessory to, a rich and ever-progressing development of ideal content, which deals at its will with all the material of speech, which contracts, expands, and transfers the meanings of words, which converts the physical and concrete into the intellectual and abstract, which produces variety out of sameness, and is never at a loss for means whereby to provide with its suitable sign any fresh acquisition to the sum of things known, any new conception or deduction. In continuing at present our discussion of the life of language, we have first to note the varying rate at which the processes of growth go on, and to bring to light some of the circumstances which affect their progress.

The fact of variation in the rate of linguistic growth, it may be remarked by way of introduction, is a very obvious one. Our own English has changed much less during the past two hundred and fifty years than during the like period next preceding; and vastly less in the last five centuries than during the five which went before them. The German of the present day is not more altered from the ancient type of Germanic speech than was the English of six or seven centuries ago; nor the Icelandic now current than the Anglo-Saxon of King Alfred and his predecessors. The modern Romanic dialects—the Spanish, French, Italian, and the rest—have deviated far more widely from the Latin of Cicero and Virgil than has the dialect of the Greeks from that of Cicero's Hellenic contemporaries; and they differ from one another not a little in the degree, as well as in the mode, of their respective deviation. To go somewhat further from home, the Arabic of the Bedouin in this century is incomparably more nearly identical with that of the tribes through whose borders the children of Israel were led by Moses than is any one of our contemporary European tongues with its ancestor of the same remote period. And there are to be found upon the face of the earth dialects which are even now so rapidly changing that those who speak them would be unable to converse with either their ancestors