The Future Of Philology [pp. 698-714]

1874.]
THE FUTURE OF PHILOLOGY.
703o
give the new generation at manageable selection of choice authors,
and perhaps produce a new era of creative energy, inl working
over the old material into new forms. Something good would be
sure to conle from such a struggle for life.
We nmust also look after pasigraphy. The telegraph operators
who send messages between countries speaking different languages are agreeing on signs, each to stand for all words of the
same sense in all the languageswith which they have to do, just
as Arabic figures do over so large a part of the world; and a
kind of universal written language for the telegraph will soon
grow up, to the astonishment of the world, and the encouragemienit of linguists in times succeeding to attempt a universal vocal
language.
Another class of changes which may be made in language, relates to the structure of words. Speech was not madAe, it grows.
And like other things that grow, it needs making for man's use.
The world is made for man only so far as it is madet by man, and
indeed not half so far as that. When it is said that language
grows, it means that it has not been put together under the
direction of reason and reflective purpose, but is the result of
social necessities acting under the laws of association. Sounds
have become the signs of things and so turned into words because they were associated with the things, perhaps by mere
accident. Words run together and form compounds on the
ground of any striking associations, which may have reason in
them or may not. Favorite combinations of words always run
to illogical and unreasonable extremes. It was a great gain to
our speech to use the dative sign to with the infinitive when it is
really in the dative case, but now that the crafty preposition has
fair hold of the verb, it sticks to it everywhere to the dismay
of the parsers, who cannot see what a preposition can be doing
with subject or predicate nominative of a sentence. The old
transitive verbs began to use have to denote complete action,
changinLg I hacve a book bo,ught into 1 ho,ve bougyt a book. It was a
great gain. But it was no sooner established than it began to
be used with ilntransitive verbs, and now the upstart he has
gone has driven out the old he is gone, in defiance of all analysis.
Old forms which are in very frequent use or have some alliter ation or other rhythmical jingle or cadence, are held in memory
andc repeated long after like forms have become obsolete in other
combinat ions.