Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/161

IV.] their language grow in names and expressions for objects, processes, experiences, emotions, relations!

This is but a magnified example of what is always and everywhere going on in language: it expands and contracts in close adaptation to the circumstances and needs of those who use it; it is enriched and impoverished along with the enrichment or impoverishment of their minds. We have already pointed out that the lowest and least educated classes of English Speakers use not a tenth of the words which constitute to our apprehension the English tongue; the reduction, then, of the English people in its entirety to the condition of the classes referred to would imply the utter extinction of more than nine-tenths of its resources of expression: and all declension of civilization, decay of natural vigour, intermission of instruction, tends, in its way and measure, toward such a result; while, on the other hand, a race that is growing in knowledge and rising in character makes its tongue richer and nobler at every step of its upward career. But it is needless to insist farther upon a truth so obvious: no one will think of denying that the content of any language, in words and phrases and their meanings, must correspond with and be measured by the mental wealth of the community to whom it belongs, and must change as this changes. It is but the simplest corollary from the truth which we have already established, that men make their own language, and keep it in existence by their tradition, and that they make and transmit it for their own practical uses, and for no other end whatsoever.

A vastly more subtle and difficult question is, in what shall consist the linguistic growth which change of circumstance demands, or to which varying character and choice impel: how far shall it lie in the accession or withdrawal of words and meanings of words, and how far in development or decay of linguistic structure? It was pointed out in our first lecture that change of vocabulary, while it is the most legitimate and inevitable of any that a language undergoes, is also the least penetrating, touching most lightly the essential character of speech as the instrument of thought. And we saw later how such words as