[…] the general effort of language-making is toward the provision of expression, for the needs of communication and the uses of thought, by such means as lie most availably at hand […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.197

If we see how collocation and combination and integration and mutilation and corruption all work in succession on the same material in every part of language, producing forms and destroying them again, it is plainly within the competency of the changing circumstances and habits of the language-making community to give the history of development a climactic form.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.211

The essential unity of linguistic history, in all its phases and stages, must be made the cardinal principle of the study of language, if this is to bear a scientific character. To assume outright, as some do, either explicitly or impliedly, that ancient modes of language-making were and must have been different from modern, and that the former are not to be judged by the latter, would […] be enough to exclude the assumer from the ranks of scientific linguists.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.196

What we have to guard especially against is the tendency to look upon language-making as a task in which men engage, to which they direct their attention, which absorbs a part of their nervous energy, so that they are thereby prevented from working as effectively in other directions of effort. Language-making is a mere incident of social life and of cultural growth; its every act is suggested or called forth by an occasion which is by comparison the engrossing thing, to which the nomenclative act is wholly subordinate.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.307