Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 11.djvu/834

* LANGSTON. 756 LANGUAGE. and Collegiate Institute in Petersburg. In 1888 he was elected to Congress. He published a vol- ume of addresses, Freedom and Citizenship (1883). LANG'TON, Stephen (M228). Archbishop of Canterbury from 1207 to 1228. Langtoii was undoubtedly an Englishman, but he received the chief part of his education in Paris. After Inno- cent 111. became Pope, he summoned Langton t« Kome and made him a cardinal. In 1205 there was a disputed election to the See of Canterbury, and the whole matter was taken on appeal to Home. Innocent compelled the sixteen monks of Christ Church, who represented the cathedral chapter at Rome, to elect Stephen Langton, and the Pope consecrated him at Viterbo on June 17, 1207. His appointment, nevertheless, was re- sisted by King John, who threatened to outlaw any one who would dare to acknowledge Stephen as Archbishop. For six years Langton was ex- cluded from the see, to which he was only ad- mitted in 1213. (See John.) The reconciliation of 1213 was but temporary. In the conflict of John with his barons, Langton vras a warm par- tisan of the latter; and it was he who. at the Council of Saint Albans in 121.5. produced the old charter of liberties of Henry I., upon which the Magna Charta was based, of which latter document he was the first of the subscribing wit- nesses. When the Pope, acting on the representa- tion of John, and espousing his cause as that of a vassal of the Holy See, excnmmunicated the barons, Langton refused to publish the excom- munication, and was in consequence suspended from his functions, in 1215. He was restored, probably in the followinc year ; and after the accession of Henry III. he was reinstated (1218) in the See of Canterbury, from which time he occupied himself with attempts at reform, both in Church and State, till his death, which took place July 9. 1228. Langton was a learned anrl able writer, but most of his writinjrs are lost, and the chief trace which he has lejft in sacred literature is the division of the Bible into chap- ters. Consult: Hook. Lires of the Archbishops of Canlerhury. vol. ii. (London. 1862) ; Stubbs, Constitutional History, vol. i. (6th ed., Oxford. 1897). LANGT^RY, IMrs. Lillie ( 1852— ). An Eng- lish actress, born at Le Breton, the daughter of a clerjr^'man in the island of .Jersey. She was mar- ried in 1874 to Edward Langtry, and. as the '.Jersey Lily,' was noted for her beauty in English society before she began her career upon the stage. Her debut before the London public (De- cember. 1881) was at the Havmarket Theatre, in l^he f^tonps to Cotxjuer. The following autumn she made her first appearance in America, with a popular success which was repeated subse- quently, thoiigh the critics generally condemned her interpretations of roles such as Pauline in the Lady of Lyons, or Rosalind in As Tou LikeTt. Mr. Langtry died in 1897, and in 189!) she was mar- ried to Hugo Gerald de Bathe. In 1903 she returned to .America, starring in Thr CroMi/vii/s. written by her in collaboration with J. Hartley Manners. LANGUAGE (OP.. Fr. lanqaqe. from Lat. Itnqtin, tongue, language. OLat. dinftua. tongue; connected with Goth, tnntjo. OHG. ziinqn. Ger. Zunr/e. .AS. titnnf. Eng. tontjue) . In its widest use, all means of expressing or of communicating feeling and thought. In this sense there is a 'language' of plastic art or of music, consisting of tho.se symbols and conventions used in artistic expression which arc intelligible only to persons educated to understand them. In a narrower sense language is restricted to tlie various forms of bodily expression — gesture, grimace, articula- tion; and in a third and commoner usage it designates only such forms of bodily expression as have been universalized through social con- vention. Articulate speech is the paramount form; but there are also sign and gesture lan- guages of complex development, such as the sign language of deaf-mutes or that in vogue between foreign-speaking tribes of prairie Indians. See Gesture L.^nguage. Language may be studied either as a utility, an art, or a .science. The first of these studies gives rise to an extensive methodology of lan- giLiage-teaching, and the second to a>sthetic cul- tivation of composition and elocution ; butneitlier broaches, strictly speaking, the .scientific field. The science of language is threefold. It includes (1) philologj', or the study of the structure and history of languages; (2) jjlionetics, or the physi- ological bases of speech; (3) the psychology- of language, dealing with the questions of its origin and natural history and with its relations to mind in general. All theories as to the origin of language are conjectural ; no one of them can plead for its case more than plausibility. Before the nineteenth cen- tury, philosophers usually considered language either as a direct revelation to man from divinity, or as the invention of primitive genius; but these views have now been for the most part discarded. Tile science of philology' endeavors to trace all human speech to certain primitive or root words which form its ultimate data; but these words already constitute language, even if unorganized. Where the philologist leaves off, the psychologist undertakes the study. His method is perfor^'e comparative; that is, he observes the acquisition of speech in childhood, studies the languages of savages, and the communicative signs of animals, and thence, taking into consideration the growth of human institutions in general, infers the steps in the evolution of language. It is now generally conceived that the origin of language was eontemporar- with the origin or accentuation of gregarious instinct. There is supposed to have been a stage when the human species, living singly or in isolated families, be- gan under the influence of natural exigencies to draw together in tribal companies. Among all gregarious animals we find more or less developed forms of signaling, as among herbivora. Possibly among some there is even complex communica- tion, as the 'antennal language' of ants. The hu- man species, subjected to the stress of social organization, similarly developed its first crude comnuinity of signs, which, in part because of man's superior powers of articulation, but mainly because of his intellectual supremacy, gave rise to organized speech. There is little difference of opinion as to the nature of the need which lay at the basis of the creation of language, but the nature of the im- pulse, as primitively felt, is still open to debate. Theories as to this nature are of two general sorts. On the one hand, according to the older schools, it was held that language was broight forth in response to a feeling of need of com- munication, that primitive speech was the spon-