Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/208

186 changes continually, in its structure and content, and tends to divide, with the progress of time, into varying forms or dialects. No existing language, no recorded language, is original; each is the descendant of some earlier one, from which, perhaps, other existing or recorded languages are equally descended. With this easy clew to guide us, the labyrinth of human speech is a labyrinth no longer; it is penetrated by paths which we may securely follow. We have simply to group together according to their affinities the languages known to us; connecting, first of all, those whose totality of structure, along with what history actually teaches us of their derivation, shows them so plainly to be forms of the same original that even the most exaggerated scepticism could not venture to deny their relationship; then going on to extend our classification from the more clearly to the more obscurely, from the more closely to the more remotely connected, until we have done the utmost which the nature of the case permits, until analysis and deduction will carry us no farther. The way is plain enough at first, and even the most careless may tread it without fear of wandering; but to follow it to the end demands, along with much labour and pains, no little wariness and clearness of vision.

Let us, then, turn aside for a time from pursuing the direct course of our fundamental inquiry, "why we speak so and so," to ask who "we" are to whom the inquiry relates; who, along with us that acknowledge the various forms of the English as our native speech, use languages which are, after all, only dialectic forms of one great original mother-tongue.

The results of such an investigation into the relationship of the English language have been, to a certain extent, taken for granted during our whole discussion. This was unavoidable: we could not otherwise have talked at all of genetic connection, or illustrated the processes of linguistic growth. Now, however, we have to take up the subject more systematically, showing the extent to which the tie of relationship reaches, and presenting some of the evidence which proves its reality.

To assert that the slightly differing forms of speech which