[…] every child begins to know things by their names long before he begins to call them. The next step is to imitate and reproduce the familiar name, usually at first in the most imperfect way, by a mere hint of the true sound, intelligible only to the child’s constant attendants; and when that step is taken, then for the first time is made a real beginning of the acquisition of language. Though not all the children start with the acquisition of precisely the same words, yet their limit of variety is but a narrow one.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.11

[…] the acquisition of language is the adoption of certain classifications; herein consists a large share of its value as a means of training.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.78

[…] the first acquisition of a language does for the individual what can never be repeated later. When we first take hold of an additional language, we cannot help translating its signs into those we already know; the peculiarities of its “inner form,” the non-identity and incommensurability of its shaped and grouped ideas with those of our native speech, escape our notice. As we gain familiarity with it, as our conceptions adapt themselves to its framework and operate directly through it, we come to see that our thoughts are cast by it into new shapes, that its phraseology is its own and inconvertible. Perhaps it is here that we get our most distinct hint of the element of constraint in language-learning.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.23-24

All that is implied in the power to speak belongs indefeasibly to man, as a part of his natural endowment; but this power is guided in its development, and determined in the result it attains, by the example and instruction of other minds, already developed. It [mind] does nothing which it might not have done alone, under favoring circumstances, and with sufficient time […] but for what it actually does, both as regards the how much and the how, it has to thank those about it. Its acquisition of language is a part of its education, in just the same manner and degree as the other parts of education.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.30-31