46 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



origin of speech in general, and to connect these remote origins by 

 means of reconstructed lines of development with historically attested 

 forms of speech. Superficially the latter sort of inquiry is similar in 

 spirit to the labors of the evolutionary biologist;, for in both apparently 

 heterogeneous masses of material are, by direct chronologic testimony, 

 inference, analogy and speculation, reduced to an orderly historical 

 sequence. As a matter of fact, however, the reconstruction of lin- 

 guistic origins and earliest lines of development is totally different in 

 kind from biological reconstruction, as we shall see presently. 



Taking up the history of language in the sense in which it was first 

 defined, we find that there are two methods by which we can follow 

 the gradual changes that a language has undergone. The first and 

 most obvious method is to study the literary remains of the various 

 periods of the language of which we have record. It will then be found 

 that not only the vocabulary, but just as well the phonetics, word 

 morphology, and syntactic structure of the language tend to change 

 from one period to another. These changes are always very gradual 

 and, within a given period of relatively short duration, slight or even 

 imperceptible in amount. Nevertheless, the cumulative effect of these 

 slight linguistic changes is, with the lapse of time, so great that the 

 form of speech current at a given time, when directly compared with 

 the form of speech of the same language current at a considerably 

 earlier time, is found to differ from the latter much as it might from 

 a foreign language. It is true that the rate of change has been found 

 to be more rapid at some periods of a language than at others, but it 

 nevertheless always remains true that the changes themselves are not 

 violent and sudden, but gradual in character. The documentary study 

 of language history is of course the most valuable and, on the whole, 

 the most satisfactory. It should not be denied, however, that there 

 are dangers in its use. Literary monuments do not always accurately 

 reflect the language of the period; moreover, orthographic conserva- 

 tism hides the phonetic changes that are constantly taking place. Thus, 

 there is no doubt that the amount of change that English has under- 

 gone from the time of Shakespeare to the present is far greater than 

 a comparison of present-day with Elizabethan orthography would lead 

 the layman to suppose, so much so that I am quite convinced the great 

 dramatist would have no little difficulty in making himself under- 

 stood in Stratford-on-Avon to-day. For some languages a consider- 

 able amount of documentary historical material is available; thus, the 

 literary monuments that enable us to study the history of the English 

 language succeed each other in a practically uninterrupted series from 

 the eighth century a.d. to the present time, while the course of develop- 

 ment of Greek in its various dialects can be more or less accurately 

 followed from the ninth century B.C., a conservative date for the 

 Homeric poems, to the present time. 



