Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/155

Rh and differentiation of a unitary stock. One or two teachers of the highest popular repute ask us to believe, instead, that language had its beginning in a condition of indefinite dialectic division, and has been always tending toward unity—that there are, as an exception, two or three real families, and no more, these being the result of peculiar and unexplained processes of arbitrary concentration in the remote past; and another bold doubter makes a great stir by denying the ordinary family-tree theory of linguistic kinship, and putting in its place a theory of wave-motion, propagated from a centre. Some hold (more or less consistently) that language is a natural organism, growing by its own forces and its own laws, with which men cannot interfere: others declare it an instrumentality, produced in every item by the men themselves who use it. Some write of it as a human faculty or capacity, like sight or hearing, as a gift, as identical with thought or reason, as the one distinguishing quality of man. Others regard it as one of the outcomes of a variety of faculties and impulses, by all of which man is far removed from the lower animals; as one which, under normal conditions, is sure to show itself, but which may, by the mere force of external and accidental circumstances, be thwarted, without impeachment of man's nature, but only of his education. Some maintain that the child learns his own language; others strenuously deny that there is any teaching or learning about it. Some, once more, declare the study in which they are engaged a physical science, while to others it seems as truly an historical or moral science as any other branch of the history of man and his works.

Now, with regard to all these matters of discordant opinion, only one side can possibly be in the right. We may be able to excuse those who take the wrong side, seeing where they are misled by looking at the facts from a false point of view, by misconceiving the meaning of a term or forgetting its double application, by omitting to take into account some decisive consideration, by overlooking important items of evidence, and so on; but wrong they are, nevertheless. And it is truly unfortunate that, just upon points of the most fundamental importance, the linguists should be so at variance with one another. Surely the study of language, so extolled on all sides for the strictness of its methods and the solidity of its results, might have gone so far by this time that its votaries should be able to give a nearly unanimous opinion, for example, as to what a word is in relation to a conception, and to follow that opinion logically and consistently out to its consequences. One grand reason for the discordance has been, to be sure, that linguists were so busy with the infinite and urgent details of their work: details which they have not yet begun to exhaust—hardly, even for the majority of human languages, to look over and get well in hand.

Germany is the home of philological and linguistic study; but the Germans are rather exceptionally careless of what we may call the