[…] a language is what its speakers make it: its structure, of whatever character, represents their collective capacity in that particular direction of effort. It is, not less than every other part of their civilization, the work of the race, every generation, every individual, has borne a part in shaping it.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.224

[…] language is the expression of matured and practised thought, and the young learner enters into the study of it as fast as natural capacity and favoring circumstances enable him to do so.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.14

If language itself were a gift, a faculty, a capacity, it might admit of being regarded as the subject of direct bestowal; being only a result, a historical result, to assert that it sprang into developed being along with man is to assert a miracle […] That view of the nature of language which linguistic science establishes takes entirely away the foundation on which the doctrine of divine origin, in its form as once held, reposed. The human capacity to which the production of language is most directly due is, as has been seen, the power of intelligently, and not by blind instinct alone, adapting means to ends. This is by no means a unitary capacity; on the contrary, it is a highly composite and intricate one.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.302-303

It [language] is not a faculty, a capacity; it is not an immediate exertion of the thinking power; it is a mediate product and an instrumentality. To many, superficial or prejudiced, inquirers this seems an unsatisfactory, even a low, view; but it is because they confound together two very different senses of the word ‘language’.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.278