Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/89

II.] as we cannot hesitate to believe, make clear the rest. There is no break in the chain of analogical reasoning which compels the linguistic student to the conviction that his analyses are everywhere real, and distinguish those elements by the actual combination of which words were originally made up. On this conviction rests, for him, the value of his analytical processes: if they are to be regarded as in part historical and real, in part only theoretical and illusory, his researches into the history of language are baffled; he is in pursuit of a phantom, and not of truth.

Wherever, then, our study of words brings us to the recognition of an element having a distinct meaning and office, employed in combination with other elements for the uses of expression, there we must recognize an originally independent entity. The parts of our words were once themselves words.

Some of the remoter consequences involved in this principle will engage our attention at a more advanced stage of our inquiries into the history of human speech: our present purpose only requires us to notice that, since all known words have been constructed by putting together previously existing items of speech, the combination of old materials into new forms, the making of compounds, with frequent accompanying reduction of one of their members to a merely formal significance, is a very prominent part of the mechanism of language, one of the most fundamental and important of the processes by which are carried on its perpetual growth and change, its organic development. What other processes are the concomitants and auxiliaries of this one we shall go on to inquire in the next lecture.