ing their souls
with rhythm and accent and intonation, finding in familiar objects the
expression of their confused fancies--to whom the whole of language
might in truth be said to be a figure of speech. One person may have
introduced a new custom into the formation or pronunciation of a word;
he may have been imitated by others, and the custom, or form, or accent,
or quantity, or rhyme which he introduced in a single word may have
become the type on which many other words or inflexions of words were
framed, and may have quickly ran through a whole language. For like the
other gifts which nature has bestowed upon man, that of speech has been
conveyed to him through the medium, not of the many, but of the few, who
were his 'law-givers'--'the legislator with the dialectician standing
on his right hand,' in Plato's striking image, who formed the manners
of men and gave them customs, whose voice and look and behaviour, whose
gesticulations and other peculiarities were instinctively imitated by
them,--the 'king of men' who was their priest, almost their God...But
these are conjectures only: so little do we know of the origin of
language that the real scholar is indisposed to touch the subject at
all.

(2) There are other errors besides the figment of a primitive or
original language which it is time to leave behind us. We no longer
divide languages into synthetical and analytical, or suppose similarity
of structure to be the safe or only guide to the affinities of them. We
do not confuse the parts of speech with the categories of Logic. Nor do
we conceive languages any more than civilisations to be in a state of
dissolution; they do not easily pass away, but are far more tenacious
of life than the tribes by whom they are spoken. 'Where two or three
are gathered together,' they survive. As in the human frame, as in the
state, there is a principle of renovation as well as of decay which is
at work in all of them. Neither do we suppose them to be invented by
the wit of man. With few exceptions, e.g. technical words or words
newly imported from a foreign language, and the like, in which art has
imitated nature, 'words are not made but grow.' Nor do we attribute to
them a supernatural origin. The law which regulates them is like the law
which governs the circulation of the blood, or the rising of the sap in
trees; the action of it is uniform, but the result, which appears in the
superficial forms of men and animals or in the leav