8 32 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF LANGUAGE. 



By MICHEL BREAL. 



NONE of the works on linguistics which come out one after 

 another, whether for the use of students or of the general 

 public, seem to me to offer exactly what they ought. To one who 

 knows how to question it, language is full of lessons, because man has 

 laid up in it for many centuries the acquisitions of his material and 

 moral life. If only the changes of vowels and consonants are con- 

 sidered, the study is reduced to the proportions of a secondary branch 

 of acoustics and physiology; if the study is directed to the counting 

 of the losses suffered by the grammatical mechanism, it gives the 

 illusion of a building falling to ruin; and if one confines himself to 

 vague theories on the origin of language, he adds a chapter of not 

 much value to the history of systems. It seems to me that there is 

 something else to be done. The extraction from linguistics of what 

 can be drawn from it as food for reflection and as a rule for our 

 own language (since each of us is doing his part in the evolution of 

 human speech) is the thing that should be made most prominent, 

 and that I shall attempt. 



My present effort is to study the mental causes which have in- 

 fluenced the transformations of languages. In order to give system 

 to the investigation, I have arrayed the facts under a series of laws 

 to which term we must not attach an imperative significance, for 

 none of these laws is without exceptions; and I take pains to define 

 for each law the limits within which it is operative. I aim to show 

 that the history of language, besides achieved changes, furnishes 

 numerous cases of attempts that have been carried only part way. 



To introduce the will as a factor in the history of language after 

 so much pains have been taken within the past fifty years to exclude 

 it, seems almost like heresy. But while it was proper to discard 

 the puerilities of the science of the past, we have been content to take 

 up with the opposite extreme of a too simple psychology. We shall 

 have to shut our eyes to the evidence to fail to see that an obscure 

 but persevering will presides over changes of language. 



How shall this will be represented? I believe it should be repre- 

 sented under the form of thousands and millions and milliards of ten- 

 tative essays, usually unsuccessful, but sometimes followed by a quar- 

 ter or a half success, which, thus guided, corrected, and improved 

 upon, at length take some precise direction. The object, in lan- 

 guage, is to be understood. The child exercises itself for months 

 in speaking the vowels and articulating the consonants; and 

 how many failures does it make before it clearly pronounces a 



