Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/174

152 is most easily traced. We have but hinted here and there at the more recondite and most potent influences which are deep-seated in the individual character of different tongues and the qualities of the people who speak them. That complex and intricate combination of native capacities and dispositions, acquired and inherited habits, and guiding circumstances, of which, in each individual community, the form and development of the common speech is a product, is in no two communities the same, and everywhere requires a special and detailed study in order to its comprehension. Ethnologists are obliged, in the main, to take the differences of national character as ultimate facts, content with setting them clearly forth, not claiming to explain them; and a like necessity rests upon the linguist as regards linguistic differences: not only can he not account for the presence of peculiarities of character which determine peculiarities of speech, but even their analysis eludes his search; they manifest themselves only in these special effects, and are not otherwise demonstrable. To ascribe the differences of language and linguistic growth directly to "physical causes," to make them dependent on "peculiarities of organization," whether cerebral, laryngal, or other, is wholly meaningless and futile. Language is not a physical product, but a human institution, preserved, perpetuated, and changed, by free human action. Nothing but education and habit limits any man to the idiom in the possession of which he has grown up; within the community of speakers of the same tongue may readily be found persons with endowments as unlike, in degree and kind, as those which characterize the average men of distant and diverse races. Physical causes do, indeed, affect language, but only in two ways: first, as they change the circumstances to which men have to adapt their speech; and second, as they alter men's nature and disposition. Every physical cause requires to be transmuted into a motive or a mental tendency, before it can affect the signs by which we represent our mental acts. It is universally conceded that physical circumstances do produce a permanent effect upon the characteristics of race, internal as well as external, and so upon those, among the rest, which govern linguistic