THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



THE GKOWTH OF A LANGUAGE 



By De. CHARLES W. SUPER 



ATHENS, O. 



WE now and then come across the statement that Shakespeare uses 

 about fifteen thousand words and that he is the most copious 

 writer in the English language in the matter of vocabulary. It is not 

 difficult to count the number of words in an author after they have 

 been registered in a concordance, but the statement as to Shakespeare's 

 copiousness is misleading if not positively erroneous. It is safe to 

 affirm that Sir Walter Scott employs more words since he has written 

 upon a larger number of subjects. The same statement may also be 

 made of Mr. Gladstone and of others. Besides, the mere number of 

 different words used by an author is no test of his mental capacity, 

 since the same word may have several different meanings and he have oc- 

 casion to employ it in but one or two. " A bad case," for example, 

 means one thing to a lawyer, another to a physician, still another to the 

 moralist, while " case " unqualified has several more significations ac- 

 cording to the context. It is easy to select one thousand words in any 

 large dictionary that have five thousand different meanings. The 

 radical sense of a word is a sort of stem from which all kinds of deriva- 

 tions shoot forth, or upon which they are grafted. Some of these, when 

 used in certain cases or in a figurative sense, have only a remote rela- 

 tion to the original. " Case " in grammar is a good illustration. The 

 Oxford dictionary, as far as completed, embraces, in round numbers 

 211,000 words. Of this number 130,000 are main words; 34,000 are 

 subordinate words; 25,000 represent special combinations; 21,000 

 obvious combinations. About one fourth of the entire list is obsolete. 

 Nearly two thousand years ago the poet Horace had noted the tendency 

 of words to drop out of use and of others to come into favor. 



Yes, words long faded may again revive, 



And words may fade, now blooming and alive. 



If usage wills it so, to whom belongs 



The rule, the law, the government of tongues. 



The vagaries of usage are past finding out. It is easy to see that when 

 a thing passes out of use the name by which it was known is forgotten 

 except by special students of the past. Headers of medieval history 

 meet with many such. On the other hand, certain forms of words are 

 discarded, current expressions become obsolete, while others ara substi- 

 tuted because they embody a new thought and can not be dispensed 



