Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/300

278 character, building up a fabric of words and forms. Every item of the difference by which a given dialect is distinguished from its ancestor, or from another dialect having the same ancestry, is the work of a gradual change of usage made by the members of a community in the speech which they were every day employing as their means of mutual communication, and which, if too rapidly altered, would not answer the purposes of communication. It takes time for even that easiest of changes, a phonetic corruption or abbreviation, to win the assent of a community, and become established as the law of their speech: it takes decades, and even generations, or centuries, for an independent word to run through the series of modifications in form and meaning which are necessary to its conversion into a formative element. That the case was otherwise at the very beginning, we have not the least reason for believing, The opinion of those who hold that the whole structure of a language was produced "at a single stroke" is absolutely opposed to all the known facts of linguistic history; it has no inductive basis whatever; it rests upon arbitrary assumption, and is supported by à priori reasoning. There must have been a period of some duration—and, for aught we know, it may have been of very long duration—when the first speakers of our language talked together in their scanty dialect of formless monosyllables. The first forms, developed words containing a formal as well as a radical element, cannot have come into existence otherwise than by slow degrees, worked out by the unconscious exercise of that ingenuity in the adaptation of means to ends, of that sense for symmetry, for finished, even artistic, production, which have ever been qualities especially characterizing our division of the human race. Every form thus elaborated led the way to others: it helped to determine a tendency, to establish an analogy, which facilitated their further production. A protracted career of formal development was run during that primitive period of Indo-European history which preceded the dispersion of the branches: words and forms were multiplied until even a maximum of synthetic complexity, of fullness of inflective wealth, had been reached, from which there has