LANGTRY 



3314 



LANGUAGE 



The First Flying Machine. Three successful 

 flights of half a mile having been made by 

 power-driven models of Langley's construction 

 in 1896, Congress granted him $50,000 to build 

 a man-carrying aerodrome (as he called his 

 aeroplane). But he met with ill success and 

 finally abandoned the experiments for lack of 

 funds. His last machine was generally called 

 "Langley's Folly," On February 27, 1906, 

 heartbroken, it is said, at the failure of his 

 experiments, he died. Since his death, however, 

 his genius has been vindicated, for in June, 

 1914, Glenn Curtiss performed many successful 

 flights on the very machine on which Langley 

 had placed his hopes. See FLYING MACHINE. 



LANGTRY, lang'tri, LILY (1852- ), an 

 English actress, known as the Jersey Lily on 



account of her beauty, was born at Le Breton, 

 on the island of Jersey. Her maiden name was 

 LILY LE BRETON, and she was the daughter of 

 a clergyman of the Church of England. In 

 1874 she was married to Edward Langtry, and 

 in 1881 made her first stage appearance in 

 London in She Stoops to Conquer. In the fol- 

 lowing year she visited America and was enthu- 

 siastically received, more, perhaps, on account 

 of her physical attractions than for her ability 

 as an actress. Two years after the death of 

 her husband in 1897, she married Sir Hugo 

 Gerald de Bathe. In 1903 she returned to 

 America and starred in The Crossways, a play 

 written by her in collaboration with J. Hartley 

 Manners. She again visited the United States 

 in 1912, appearing in vaudeville. 



ANGUAGE, lang ' gwaje. Men, birds and 

 the higher animals have various ways of com- 

 municating with others of their own kind. In 

 a way all these means of communication may 

 be called language, but in the ordinary sense 

 in which the term is used language means the 

 articulate speech of man. Every nation and 

 every tribe has its language, and there are 

 upwards of 1,000 spoken languages in the world. 

 Some of these, especially the languages of bar- 

 barous tribes, are very narrow in scope and 

 limited in extent. They include a compara- 

 tively small number of words, and are spoken 

 by a limited number of people. Unless a lan- 

 guage has been reduced to writing it has not 

 been systematized, neither does it have any 

 standard by which it can be brought to a 

 higher degree of perfection. It is a "gram- 

 marless tongue." The great languages of the 

 civilized world are usually classified under two 

 groups, called families. They are the Indo- 

 European family, which includes most of the 

 languages spoken in Europe and America (ex- 

 cluding the Indian languages) and some of the 

 languages of Asia, especially those of India; 

 and the Semitic family, which includes the 

 languages of the Hebrews, Arabs, Abyssinians, 

 Assyrians, Phoenicians and Syrians. 



Origin of Language. Many theories have 

 been advanced to account for the origin of 

 language, but none seems to be perfectly satis- 

 factory. One of these theories is that the 

 first words used by men were imitations of the 

 sounds of animals, and that some of these 

 sounds have become permanent words. Just as 

 a little child may indicate a dog by "bow- 

 wow," so did the natives of Madagascar indi- 

 cate an animal found upon that island by "aye- 

 aye." Later, when the island was discovered 

 by civilized men, this name was given the 

 animal. In a similar manner the words whip- 

 poor-will and katydid originated. Interesting 

 as this theory is, it is not generally accepted. 



The theory most widely accepted is that 

 language, in the sense in which we are consid- 

 ering it, is peculiar to man, and that it has 

 been developed through the ages to enable 

 men -to communicate their ideas to others. 

 However this may be, wherever we find men 

 we find them able to converse with each other, 

 and it is through the development of lan- 

 guage that the human race has been able to 

 record its achievements from century to cen- 

 tury, and in this way to enable each genera- 

 tion to improve upon all the generations that 

 have preceded it since time began. 



