[...] each [dialect] does [...] remain nearly the same; this is what maintains the prevailing identity of speech so long as the identity of the speaking community is maintained- aside from those great revolutions in their circumstances which now and then lead whole communities to adopt the speech of another people.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.32

[…] a far grosser error, that of actually identifying speech with thought and reason […] nothing but the most imperfect comprehension of language can account for a blunder so radical […] There are many faculties which go to the production of speech. And we have only to take the most normally endowed human being and cut off artificially the avenue of a single class of sensuous impressions, those of hearing, and he will never have any speech. If speech, then, is reason, reason will have to be defined as a function of the auditory nerve.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.304-305

[…] every one is welcome to hold that alterations of speech are not made by the human will; there is no will to alter speech; there is only will to use speech in a way which is new; and the alteration comes itself as a result.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.147

[…] man can traverse space, handle and shape materials, frame textures, penetrate distance, observe the minute, beyond what he could compass with his unequipped physical powers, by so much is the reach and grasp, the penetration and accuracy, of his thought increased by speech. This part of the value of the speech is by no means easy to bring to full realization, because our minds are so used to working by and through words that they cannot even conceive of the plight they would be in if deprived of such helps.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.23

[…] though a nation may borrow culture from its neighbours, it does not in the same way borrow linguistic development; no race ever adopted a new mode of structural growth for its native speech by imitation of another; though many a community has, under sufficient external inducement, exchanged its native speech for another […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.225

[…] we have here and there, not always consciously, in our present speech, reminiscences of the old order of things, in the shape of words transferred to new uses.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.99

A […] parallel is afforded by the closely kindred art of writing, which adds to and enhances all the advantages belonging to the art of speech, and is as indispensable to the highest culture as is speech to the lower; but like speech, it came into being by a process in which the only conscious motive was communication; all its superior uses followed in the train of that […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.285

All living language is in a condition of constant growth and change. It matters not what part of the world we may go: if we can find for any existing speech a record of its predecessor at some time distant from it in the past, we shall perceive that the two are different- and more or less different, mainly in proportion to the distance of time that separates them.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.33

Man possesses, as one of his most marked and distinctive characteristics, a faculty or capacity of speech- or, more accurately, various faculties and capacities which lead inevitably to the production of speech: but the faculties are one thing, and their elaborated products are another and very different one.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.278-279

So far as the other theory, that of the independent production by each person of his own speech, implies that each inherits from his ancestors a physical constitution which makes him develop unconsciously the same speech as theirs, it is virtually coincident with the first theory [theory of a language as a race characteristic] and the same facts tell with crashing weight against it; so far as it is meant to imply that there is a general likeness in intellectual constitution between members of the same community which leads them to frame accordant systems of expression, it is equally without support from facts […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.9

To demand that “sentences”, in the present sense of that term, with subject and predicate, with adjuncts and modifiers, should have been the first speech, is precisely analogous with demanding that the first human abodes should have contained at least two stories and a cellar […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.302

Upon their [of vowel and consonant] alternation and antithesis depends the syllabic or “articulate” character of human speech […] A mere succession of vowels passing into one another would be wanting in definite character; it would be rather a sing-song than speech; and, on the other hand, a mere succession of consonants, though pronounceable by sufficient effort, would be an indistinct and disagreeable sputter.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.68