Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/160

148. By these and other similar means, language is continually adapted by its speakers to express the modified content of their minds. At the same time, it suffers change of a yet more intimate and unconscious kind as an instrument; its phonetic shape being rendered more manageable, and its grammatical shape as well; new words of relation are made, by the attenuation of more material elements, and now and then, in a kindred way, a new form.

So far as a language is handed down from generation to generation by the process of teaching and learning, it is stable, and by this means it does remain nearly the same; so far as it is altered by the consenting action of its users, it is unstable, and it does in fact change. Examine any language, and you will find it different from its predecessor; different in a variety of items of the kinds instanced above, each of them being obviously the work of the speakers, and showing no signs of the presence of any other force. In the present stage of what we call the growth of language, nothing takes place which is not the effect of human agency; the only obscurity about it grows out of the fact that there is involved the consenting action of a community, since language is a social institution, and exists primarily and consciously for the purpose of communication. But if this is so nowadays, then it was so in the period next preceding, and in the one before that; and so on, until the very beginning is reached. For we have no right to assume unnecessarily that the processes of growth have essentially changed; that is to say, if the methods of word-making and form-making as exhibited in the historical period are sufficient to account for the whole existing material of speech, we are not authorized to postulate others.

And such is the case. Forms have been made, through all the historical periods, by the combination of independent elements, and the reduction of one of them to a formal value by means of changes of form and changes of meaning, such as are exhibited in every part of language; and this action, varying in kind and degree under the changing circumstances of developing speech, can never, so far as at present appears, be proved insufficient to explain the structure of language. If there are problems of structure as yet unsolved, they may be expected to yield to more skilled investigation; or, if they do not, it will be presumably because of the loss of needed evidence. The name-making process implies only the christening of a formed idea, the provision of a sign which shall henceforth be associated with a particular conception, and used to represent it in social intercourse and in the operations of thought. And the sign is obtained just where it can be most conveniently found, according to the circumstances and habits of each particular community. There is nothing approaching to necessity in an etymology. It is only a tie of convenience that connects the new name with its source: in the case of book, the tie of historical development out of an accidental selection of material; in