The Mother Tongue (Volume 2) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: between what is right and what is wrong in many doubtful cases. Grammar, then, is useful as a tool. But the study of grammar is also valuable as training in observation and thought. Language is one of the most delicate and complicated instruments which men use, and a study of its laws and their application is a worthy occupation for the mind. DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE. Language never stands still. Every language, until it dies (that is, until it ceases to be spoken at all), is in a state of continual change. The English which we speak and write is not the same English that was spoken and written by our grandfathers, nor was their English precisely like that of Queen Elizabeth's time. The farther back we go, the less familiar we find ourselves with the speech of our ancestors, until finally we reach a kind of English which is quite as strange to us as if it were a foreign tongue. Such changes take place gradually, ? so slowly indeed, that we are hardly aware that they are going on at all, ? but in the long run they may transform a language so completely that only scholars can recognize the old words and forms as identical, at bottom, with the new. Indeed, the changes may go so far that entirely new languages are formed. Thus from Latin, the language of the ancient Romans (which is now dead) have come, by these gradual processes, a whole group of living modern languages, including French, Italian,and Spanish, differing from each other so much that a Frenchman cannot understand an Italian or a Spaniard any better than he can an Englishman or a German. The changes which a language undergoes are of many different kinds. Most of them, however, we can observe in our own experience if we stop to think of what takes place about us. They affect (1) vocabulary, that is, the s...