[…] at the first attainable period of our knowledge of it [language], whether by actual record or by the inferences of the comparative student, it is in a state of almost endless subdivision […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.175

[…] by external forces, every act and influence of which is clearly definable, the cultivated languages have been and are extending their sway, crowding out of existence the ‘patois’ which had grown up under the old order of things, gaining such advantage that men are beginning to dream of a time when one language may be spoken all over the earth […] It is possible so to misunderstand these facts in the wide history of human speech as to believe that language actually began in a condition of infinite dialectic division, and has been from the outset tending toward concentration and final unity.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.176-177

No man can become possessed of any existing language without learning it; no animal (that we know of) has any expression which he learns, which is not the direct gift of nature to him […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.282

Of such spoken and audible means [uttered and audible signs] of expression no human community is found destitute. From the highest races to the lowest, all men speak; all are able to interchange such thoughts as they have. Language, then, appears clearly “natural” to man […] man is the sole possessor of language.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.2

Of the out-and-out invention of new words, language in the course of its recorded history (for we do not speak of its initial stage) presents only rare examples.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.120

Spoken language began […] when a cry of pain, formerly wrung out by real suffering, and seen to be understood and sympathized with, was repeated in imitation, no longer as a mere instinctive utterance, but for the purpose of intimating to another: "I am (was, shall be) suffering" […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.288-289

The community’s share in the work is dependent on and conditioned by the simple fact that language is not an individual possession, but a social. It exists […] not only partly, but primarily, for the purpose of communication; its other uses come after and in the train of this. To the great mass of its speakers, it exists consciously for communication alone; this is the use that exhibits and commends itself to every mind. That would have no right to be called a language which only one person understood and could use; and there is not, nor has ever been, any such in existence.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.149

The condition of American languages is […] an epitome of that of the language of the world in general. Great and wide-spread families, limited groups, isolated and perishing dialects, touch and jostle one another.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.264

The general laws or general tendencies of language […] are really only laws of human action, under the joint guidance of habit and circumstance.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.146

The general object attained by additions to language is obviously the extension and the improvement of expression, supply of representative signs for new knowledge, amendment in the representation of old knowledge. But […] these ends are to no small extent gained without any apparent change in language. In part, by new syntactical combinations of the old materials of speech, by putting together old words into new sentences: and this is plainly a department of the use of language by which great results are won; hosts of new cognitions and deductions are thus provided for.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.109

The language is stabilized, especially as regards all those alterations which proceed from inaccuracy; local differences are not only restrained from arising, but are even wiped out, so far as the effect of education extends.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.158

The science of language has democratized our view […] it has taught us that one man’s speech is just as much a language as another man’s; that even the most cultivated tongue that exists is only the dialect of a certain class in a certain locality […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.178

There are few unmixed languages in the world, as there are few unmixed races; but the one mixture does not at all determine the other, or measure it.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.9

There is […] a degree of individuality about every being, thing, act, quality, which would justify it in laying claim to a separate appellation; but language would be utterly unmanageable if it were made up of such appellations; and, in practice, having named an individual thing, we apply the same name to whatever other things are enough like it to form a class with it.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.78

There is […] another important corollary from our established view of language as a constituent element of human civilization. Its production had nothing to do, as a cause, with the development of man out of any other and lower race. Its province was to raise man from a savage state to the plane which he was capable of reaching. The only development in which it was concerned is the historical development of man’s faculties. Except, of course, that minor and limited change which falls within the sphere of ordinary eredity. The descendant of a cultivated race is more cultivable than the descendant of a wild one.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.306

There is no limit to the degree to which a language may, by special disturbing causes, become altered in its material and structure, even to the effectual disguise of its original relationships.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.188

This great and most important institution [language], though carried forward from step to step of its existence in its condition as heretofore existing, by the incessant process of teaching and learning, is at the same time in no part or particle out of reach of the altering action of those who learn and use it.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.144

Though languages are traditional institutions, they are of a special kind, capable of application to ethnological purposes far beyond any other, as being so various and so distinct as they are, capable of being looked at objectively, and handled and compared with accuracy. They are persistent, also, at least to a degree far beyond other institutions. To admit that a language can be exchanged, therefore, is by no means to deny its value as a record of human history, even of race-history; it is only put that value upon its proper basis, and confess those limitations which can in no manner be avoided […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.274

We regard every language […] as an institution, one of those which, in each community, make up its culture. Like all the constituent elements of culture, it is various in every community, even in the different individuals composing each. There are communities in which it has come down within the strict limits of race; in others it has been, partly or wholly, taken from strange races; for, like the rest, it is capable of being transferred or shifted. Race-characteristics can only go down by blood; but race-acquisitions- language not less than religion, or science- can be borrowed or lent.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.280-281

Whatever language he [learner] first acquires, this is to him the natural and necessary way of thinking and speaking; he conceives of no other as even possible […] For even the poorest language in existence is so much better than any one’s powers could have produced unaided, that its acquisition would imply a greatly accelerated drawing out and training of the powers of even the most gifted being; the advantage is so great that the disadvantage entirely disappears before it.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.22

While a people’s capacities and acquirements make its language, we must not fail to notice also the contrary truth, that its language helps to determine its intellectual character and progress. The powerful reflex influence of language on mental action is a universally admitted fact in linguistics; to allow it is only to allow that rooted habits, learned by each generation from its predecessor, have a controlling influence on action- which is axiomatic.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.225

[…] communication is the leading determinative force throughout […] this determines the unity of a language, and puts a restraint upon its dialectic variation […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.286-287

[…] correspondence in the material of different languages, if existing in measure and kind beyond what can be accounted for as the result of accident or of borrowing, is explainable only as due to the separate tradition of an originally common tongue, a tradition which preserved a part of the original usages, while it modified or discarded other parts, or introduced what was new, to such an extent as to obscure, and perhaps, even to hide, the evidences of former connection.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.179-180

[…] despite all […] varieties, the language is one, and one for the simple reason that, though the various individuals who speak it may talk so as to be unintelligible to one another, they may also, on matters of the most familiar common interest, understand one another. As the direct object of language is communication, the possibility of communication makes the unity of a language. No one can define, in the proper sense of that term, a language, for it is a great concrete institution, a body of usages prevailing in a certain community, and it can only be shown and described.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.156-157

[…] different languages make different classifications […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.20

[…] every item of knowledge and of self-command that it [mind] conquers it fixes in assured possession by means of language; and it is always reaching out for more knowledge, and gaining additional control of its powers, and fixing them in the same way. It is […] always at work under the surface of speech, recasting and amending the classifications involved in words, acquiring new control of conceptions once faintly grasped and awkwardly wielded, crowding new knowledge into its old terms- all, on the whole, by and with the help of language, and yet in each individual item independently of language […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.140

[…] every language in the gross is an institution, on which scores or hundreds of generations and unnumbered thousands of individual workers have laboured.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.309

[…] for scientific purposes the term [language] needs restriction, since it would apply else to nearly all human action and product, which discloses the thought that gives it birth. Language, then, signifies rather certain instrumentalities whereby men consciously and with intention represent their thought, to the end, chiefly, of making it known to other men: it is expression for the sake of communication.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.1

[…] he [man] adds new facts, draws new distinctions, establishes new relations, which the subsisting technical language of the department is incompetent to express; and there arises thus an absolute need of new expression which must in some way or other be met: and it is met. Every language must prove itself able to signify what it is in the mind of its speakers to express; if unequal to that, it would have to abdicate its office; it would no longer answer the purposes of a language.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.35

[…] how far language is from being identical with thought […] It is […] the means of expression of thought, an instrumentality auxiliary to the processes of thought.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.30

[…] in ordinary use, “language” means utterance, and utterance only […] language, for the purposes of this discussion, is the body of uttered and audible signs by which in human society thought is principally expressed, gesture and writing being its subordinates and auxiliaries.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.2

[…] it [language] is taught us by those among whom our lot is cast in childhood. And this obvious and common-sense answer is also […] the correct one. We have to look to see what is implied in it. In the first place, it sets aside and denies two other conceivable answers: that language is a race-characteristic, and, as such, inherited from one’s ancestry, along with color, physical constitution, traits of character, and the like; and that it is independently produced by each individual, in the natural course of his bodily and mental growth.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.7-8

[…] language is an instrumentality, and the law of simplicity of beginnings applies to it not less naturally and necessarily than to other instrumentalities.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.226

[…] language is in an especial manner the incorporation and revelation of the acts of the soul.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.303

[…] 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 favouring circumstances enable him to do so.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.14

[…] language, to the general apprehension of its users, is simply a means of receiving from others and giving to them: what it is to the individual soul, what it is to the race, few have reach of vision to see.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.286

[…] no fact in any language is completely understood until there has been brought to bear upon it the evidence of every other analogous fact, related or unrelated […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.315

[…] one gets his language by a process of learning, and only thus […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.26

[…] perhaps the best and most trustworthy test of the value of a language is, what its speakers have made it do. Language is but the instrument for the expression of thought. If a people […] has distinguished well and combined well and reasoned well its language, of however apparently imperfect structure, in the technical sense of that term, enjoys all the advantage which comes from such use; it is the fitting instrument of an enlightened mind […] In another sense also 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.223-224

[…] slower or more rapid, the production of language is a continuous process; it varies in rate and kind with the circumstances and habits of the speaking community; but it never ceases; there was never a time when it was more truly going on than at present.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.308

[…] the apparatus of logical statement: the ability to put a subject and predicate closely together, and to test their correspondence by repeated comparison, comes only by language; and it is fruitful means whereby old cognitions are corrected and new ones attained.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.21

[…] the grandest movement in a growing and improving language is that from more material to more formal uses, whereby both words and phrases take on a less gross and physical meaning, even to the extent of being attenuated into form-words, or, in combination with other elements, into formative elements […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.222

[…] the individual learns his language, obtaining the spoken signs of which it is made up by imitation from the lips of others, and shaping his conceptions in accordance with them. It is thus that every existing language is maintained in life; if this process of tradition, by teaching and learning, were to cease in any tongue upon earth, that tongue would at once become extinct.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.32

[…] the mass of each one’s language is acquired by him by a process of learning, of direct acquisition of what is put before his mind by others; that, however, each one is at the same time a partner in the work of changing the language: contributing, indeed, only an infinitesimal quota toward it, in exact proportion to his importance in the aggregate of speakers by whom the language is kept in existence, yet doing his part in a sum which is all made up of such infinitesimal parts, and would not exist without them.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.153

[…] the meaning of the terms ‘language’ and ‘dialect’, in their relation to one another. They are only two names for the same thing, as looked at from different points of view. Any body of expressions used by a community, however limited and humble, for the purposes of communication and as the instrument of thought, is a language; no one would think of crediting its speakers with the gift of dialect but not of language. On the other hand, there is no tongue in the world to which we should not with perfect freedom and perfect propriety apply the name of dialect, when considering it as one of a body of related forms of speech.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.177-178

[…] the old material of language is constantly suffering extension and transferral to new uses, obstructed by no too intrusive sense of original meaning.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.78

[…] the remarkable analogies which exist between the birth and growth and decay and extinction of a language and those of an organized being, or of a species, have been often enough noticed and dwelt upon: some have even inferred from them that language is an organism, and leads an organic life, governed by laws with which men cannot interfere.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.34

[…] the rule is laid down that everything in language is by origin an inflected form either of verb or of noun.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.208

[…] the truth that language is only an instrumentality, and the mind the force that uses it; that the mind […] is able to do a high quality of work with only the scantiest hints of expression, catching from the connection and from position the shades of meaning and the modes of relation which it needs.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.238

[…] there must be in every existing language, at any time, processes of differentiation not yet fully carried out, words and form of words in a state of transition, altering but not altered, words and phrases under trial, introduced but not general; words obsolescent but not yet obsolete; old modes of pronunciation beginning to seem strange and affected, new modes coming into vogue- and so on, through the whole catalogue of possible linguistic changes. And this is, in fact, precisely the state of things, in every language under the sun […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.154

[…] what is true of the words of two languages is true of the languages themselves: languages made up of related words must be descended from a single common language.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.169

[…] what is universally true between related languages: their sounds, in corresponding words, are by no means always the same; they are diverse, rather, but diverse by a constant difference; there exists between them a fixed relation, though it is not one of identity. Hence, in the comparison of two languages, a first point to which attention has to be directed is this: what sounds in the one, vowel or consonantal, correspond to what sounds in the other. This condition of things is only a necessary result of the fact […] that no two languages change after precisely the same fashion.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.58

[…] 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. The call is in very great part for technical vocabularies, words for learned use [...].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.118-119

[…] while human language is thus one as contrasted with brute expression, it is in itself of a variety which is fairly to be termed discordance. It is a congeries of individual languages, separate bodies of audible signs for thought, which, reckoning even those alone of which the speakers are absolutely unintelligible one another, are very numerous. These languages differ among themselves in every degree.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.3

A whole language, or family of languages, is annihilated by the destruction of the community that spoke it, or by the adoption of another language by that community.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.266

All living language is in a condition of constant growth and change.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.33

All the material of language exhibits more or less the working of all the processes of growth […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.49

All through the world of matter and of mind, our predecessors, with such wisdom as they at command, have gone observing, deducing, and classifying; and we inherit in and through language the results of their wisdom […] So with the qualities of objects, both physical and moral, and with their relations, through the whole round of categories […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.21

An acquired language is something imposed from without upon the methods and results of mental action. It does, indeed, as a frame-work imposed upon a growing and developing body, gives shape to that which underlies it, determining the “inner form”; and yet it is everywhere loose and adjustable. While working by it, the mind also works under it, shifting and adapting, changing and improvising its classifications, working in new knowledge and better insight.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.30

As all the items of a given language are kept in existence only by being taught and learned, it is evident enough that the cessation of this process of tradition with regard to any item will bring about its annihilation.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.98

Every one acquires that which the accident of birth places within his reach, exercising his faculties upon that foundation, expanded and at the same time constrained by it, making to it his individual contribution, if he have one to make: just as truly in the case of language as of any other part. Language is in no way to be separated from the rest: it is in some respects very unlike them; but so they are unlike one another; if it be the one most fundamentally important, most highly characteristic, most obviously the product and expression of reason, that is only a difference of degree.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.280

Every single language has [...] its own peculiar framework of established distinctions, its shapes and forms of thought, into which for the human being who learns that language as his “mother-tongue,” is cast the content and product of his mind, his store of impressions, however acquired, his experience and knowledge of the world.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.21-22

If language broke out from within, driven by the wants of the soul, it ought to come forth fastest and most fully in the solitary; since he, cut off from other means of improvement, is thrown back upon this as his only resource: but the solitary man is as speechless as the lower animals.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.286

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 [...] 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

If we deny to primitive man the possession of the other elements of civilization, and hold him to have gradually developed them out of scanty beginnings made by himself, then there is no reason why we should not hold the same view in respect to language, which is only such an element. Even in existing languages the differences of degree are great, as in existing states of culture in general.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.300-301

In a true and defensible sense, every individual speaks a language different from every other. The capacities and the opportunities of each have been such that he has acquired command of a part of English speech not precisely identical with any one else’s […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.154

In order to understand the historical movement of any language at a given period, we need to analyze it into such parts as these [change in the outer form of words, change in the inner content of words, loss of words and forms, production of new words and forms], and to see how, separately and together, they are working; to note the kind and degree of activity of each, and trace, if possible, the causes that determine their difference.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.134

It is by no means only in verbal phrases and other examples of the reduction of terms of independent meaning to formal value that language exhibits its characteristic tendency toward oblivion of original meaning and disregard of etymological concinnity.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.96

It is not easy to over-estimate the advantage won by mind in the obtaining of a language.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.23

It is to be noticed [...] that the question of roots as the historical beginnings of language is quite distinct from that of the origin of language […] the one is exclusively linguistic, the other partly anthropological.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.200-201

Language comes to be just what its users make it; its offices correspond to their capacities; if there is a higher degree of formative structure in one language than in another, the reason lies in the difference of quality of the two races, their different capacity of education and growth; not at all in the character of the beginnings from which both alike started, nor of the materials which both alike have ever since had at command.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.227

Language is merely that product and instrumentality of the inner powers which exhibits them most directly and most fully in their various modes of action; by which […] our inner consciousness is externized, turned up to the light for ourselves and others to see and study.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.304

Language is, upon the whole, the most conspicuous of the manifestations of man’s higher endowments, and the one of the widest and deepest influence on every other; and the superiority of man’s endowments is vaguely known as reason- and that is the whole ground of the assertion of identity [between speech and reason].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.304

Language may be briefly and comprehensively defined as the means of expression of human thought. In a wider and freer sense, everything that bodies forth thought and makes it apprehensible, in whatever way, is called language […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.1