Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/390

368 But further, apart from this whole matter of morphological form, of grammatical structure, of the indication, expressed or implied, of relations, another department contributes essentially to our estimate of the value of a language: namely, its material content, or what is signified by its words. The universe, with all its objects and their qualities, is put before the language-makers to be comprehended and expressed, and the different races, and tribes, and communities, have solved the problem after a very different fashion. Names-giving implies not merely the distinction of individual things, but, no less, classification and analysis, in every kind, and of every degree of subtlety. There are conceptions, and classes of conceptions, of so obvious and practical character, that their designations are to be found in every language that exists or ever has existed: there are hosts of others which one community, or many, or the most, have never reached. Does a given tongue show that the race which speaks it has devoted its exclusive attention to the more trivial matters in the world without and within us, or has it apprehended higher things? Has it, for example, so studied and noted the aspects of nature that it can describe them in terms of picturesque power? Has it distinguished with intellectual acuteness and spiritual insight the powers and operations of our internal nature, our mind and soul, so that it can discuss psychological questions with significance and precision? Any dialect, isolating or inflective, monosyllabic or polysynthetic, may be raised or lowered in the scale of languages by the characteristics which such inquiries bring to light. In these, too, there is the widest diversity, depending on original capacity, on acquired information and civilization, and on variety of external circumstance and condition—a diversity among different branches of the same race, different periods of the same history, and, where culture and education introduce their separating influences, between different classes of the same community. Our earliest inquiries (in the first three lectures) into the processes of linguistic growth showed us that the changes which bring about this diversity, the accretions to the vocabulary of a tongue, the deepening of the meaning of its words, are the