Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/68

46 creature! how is it possible that he and his like should build up a reef or an island?" No one ever set himself deliberately at work to invent or improve language—or did so, at least, with any valuable and abiding result; the work is all accomplished by a continual satisfaction of the need of the moment, by ever yielding to an impulse and grasping a possibility which the already acquired treasure of words and forms, and the habit of their use, suggest and put within reach. In this sense is language a growth; it is not consciously fabricated; it increases by a constant and implicit adaptation to the expanding necessities and capacities of men.

This, again, is what is meant by the phrases "organic growth, organic development," as applied to language. A language, like an organic body, is no mere aggregate of similar particles; it is a complex of related and mutually helpful parts. As such a body increases by the accretion of matter having a structure homogeneous with its own, as its already existing organs form the new addition, and form it for a determinate purpose—to aid the general life, to help the performance of the natural functions, of the organized being—so is it also with language: its new stores are formed from, or assimilated to, its previous substance; it enriches itself with the evolutions of its own internal processes, and in order more fully to secure the end of its being, the expression of the thought of those to whom it belongs. Its rise, development, decline, and extinction are like the birth, increase, decay, and death of a living creature.

There is a yet closer parallelism between the life of language and that of the animal kingdom in general. The speech of each person is, as it were, an individual of a species, with its general inherited conformity to the specific type, but also with its individual peculiarities, its tendency to variation and the formation of a new species. The dialects, languages, groups, families, stocks, set up by the linguistic student, correspond with the varieties, species, genera, and so on, of the zoölogist. And the questions which the students of nature are so excitedly discussing at the present day—the nature of specific distinctions, the derivation of species by