Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/77

II.] own purpose; each is separately exposed to the changes and vicissitudes of linguistic life, is modified, recombined, or dropped, according to its own uses and capacities. Hence etymology, the historical study of individual words, is the foundation and substructure of all investigation of language; the broad principles, the wide-reaching views, the truths of universal application and importance, which constitute the upper fabric of linguistic science, all rest upon word-genealogies. Words are the single witnesses from whom etymology draws out the testimony which they have to give respecting themselves, the tongue to which they belong, and all human speech.

How the study of words is made the means of bringing to light the processes of linguistic growth, and what those processes are, it will, accordingly, be our next duty to examine and set forth by suitable examples. Having only illustration in view, we will avoid all cases of a difficult or doubtful character, noticing only words whose history is well known; choosing, moreover, those which, while they truly exhibit the principles we seek to establish, are at the same time of the simplest kind, and most open to general comprehension.

There is no word or class of words whose history does not exemplify, more or less fully, all the different kinds of linguistic change. It will be more convenient for us, however, to take up these kinds in succession, and to select our instances accordingly. And, as the possibility of etymological analysis depends in no small part on the nature of words as not simple entities, but made of of separate elements, this composite character of the constituents of speech may properly engage our first attention.

That we are in the constant habit of putting together two independent vocables to form a compound word, is an obvious and familiar fact. Instances of such words are fear-inspiring, god-like, break-neck, house-top. They are substitutes for the equivalent phrases inspiring fear, like a god, apt to break one's neck, top of a house. For the sake of more compact and convenient expression, we have given a closer unity to the compound word than belongs to the aggregate