674 ANNUAL BEPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1912. 



ular language or group of languages for as long a period as the evi- 

 dence at hand allows, or one may attempt to pass beyond the limits 

 of historically recorded or reconstructed speech, to reconstruct the 

 ultimate origin of speech in general, and to connect these remote ori- 

 gins 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 chrono- 

 logic testimony, inference, analogy, and speculation reduced to an 

 orderly historical sequence. As a matter of fact, however, the recon- 

 struction of linguistic 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, \vithin 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 tmie, so great 

 that the form of speech current at a given tune, when directly com- 

 pared with the form of speech of the same language current at a con- 

 siderably 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 them- 

 selves 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 conservatism hides the phonetic changes that are con- 

 stantly taking place. Thus there is no doubt that the amount of 

 change that English has undergone from the time of Shakespeare to 

 the present is far greater than a comj)arison 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 understood in Stratford-on-Avon to-day. 

 For some languages a considerable 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 



