[…] each item, or each class of accordant items, has its own time and occasion, and analogies, and secondary causes, and consequences; it is their sum and collective effect which make up the growth of language.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.43

[…] its [of linguistic study] trustworthy results go […] to prove that the combination of independent element with element has been from the beginning, in the languages of our family, the fertile and the sufficient method of new external growth, has furnished the needed supply of fresh material, which then, under the action of the other processes, has been applied to meet the needs of expression.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.125

[…] loss of what had constituted the material of a language was an appreciable element in that constant change and development which we called its growth. Even such a process of subtraction is fairly enough to be reckoned as a part of growth; just as the growth of organic beings consists in removal as well as in resupply.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.98

[…] there are no limits to the diversity which may arise by discordant growth between languages originally one.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.269

[…] to understand fully the means whereby language compasses the expression of whatever calls for expression is to comprehend the essential nature of linguistic growth, and even that of language itself.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.135

[…] when science and art and philosophy are making rapid advances, when new branches of knowledge are springing up, one after another, each calling for a whole vocabulary of new terms, when infinite numbers of new facts and new objects are coming to notice, then the native modes of growth, of even the most fertile language, will be taxed beyond their capacity to provide a nomenclature for all.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.118-119

It is simply impossible to exhaust the variety of significant change in linguistic growth: there is no conceivable direction in which a transfer may not be made; there is no assignable distance to which a word may not wander from its primitive meaning. There is no such thing as a concise and exhaustive classification of such variety […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.82

Take any individual bit of linguistic growth, and it is found and acknowledged to be the act of a human being, working toward definable ends under the government of recognizable motives, even though without any reflective consciousness of what he is accomplishing […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.145-146

The method of growth out of the native resources of a language, by putting its material together into new combinations, and so making new names for things, and sometimes new forms, is of course one of much slower operation than the importation of learned and technical terms from abroad […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.129

This last mode of change [acquisition of new material] […] constitutes in a higher and more essential sense than any of the others the growth of language and ought to bring most distinctly to light the forces actually concerned in that growth.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.108-109