Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/355

Rh meaning from what they had half a century ago. And how pregnant with thought they are! While we have here no growth of vocabulary, we have an expansion of content that is of almost unbounded extent. We have a repetition of the same process which we find in the Greek when it began to be used as the language of philosophy. We may read page after page of Plato, knowing the radical or common meaning of his words; but if we are unfamiliar with Greek thought we get but a faint adumbration of his views. Our familiar "idea" is a good example of Plato's method with words. Its root is plainly a verb signifying "see." Herodotus says the horse can not endure the sight (idea) of the camel. In all Plato's writings it does not have reference to what is seen, but to what is mentally conceived, an archetype, or immaterial pattern of an object. In our day it is so common that everybody uses it. The colloquial forms "idee" and "idear" have grown out of it, and it may mean almost any form of intellectual activity. "Graft" is a recent and familiar example of a like process. Dictionaries ten years old do not give the definition with which we are all well acquainted. Some one made use of the word in its recent sense. Its appropriateness was at once recognized. It was copied by one periodical after another and repeated orally until now it is literally in everybody's mouth.

The usual assumption is that language represents a static fact; that it is to be found in books and in other printed and written matter; on tablets of stone and bronze. Language is, however, kinetic; all living languages are in a constant condition of flux. Through the mind of every human being from infancy until death, whether sane or insane, there flows a perennial stream of words that is interrupted only by sound sleep. When we read or listen to spoken discourse our thoughts usually run in an alien channel; but not necessarily. All languages are in a process of change which, although slow, is continuous. The English of Shakespeare or of Bacon is only a little more than three hundred years old, yet it is by no means the English of to-day. No matter how well we know current German, we can not read Luther's Bible intelligently. The same statement may be made of Rabelais's French, of Cervantes's Castilian and of Dante's Italian. It is a common error to speak of Greek and Latin as dead languages. The Romance tongues are nothing more than the latest phase of a development that has been going on since the earliest period of the Latin. If the Latin is dead now, when did the process of dissolution begin? The oldest French as preserved in the Strasburg oaths of A.D. 842 is about midway, as we may say, between the French of Hugo and the Latin of Cicero's age; a knowledge of either tongue enables one to read them with a fair degree of understanding.

The process of change is comparatively slow at present, and has been ever since the invention of printing, because readers endeavor to