Language, and the study of language. Twelve lectures on the principles of linguistic science
The main argument of tlie following work was first drawn out in the form of six lectures " On the Principles of Linguistic Science," delivered at the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington^ during the month of March 1864. Of these, a brief abstract was printed in the Annual Report of the Institution published in the same year.
In the following winter (December 1864, and January 1865) they were again delivered as one of the regular courses before the Lowell Institute, in Boston, having been expanded into a series of twelve lectures.
They are now laid before a wider public, essentially in their form as there presented. But they have been in the meantime carefully rewritten, and have suffered a not inconsiderable further expansion, as the removal of the enforced Procrustean limit, of sixty minutes to a lecture, has given opportunity to discuss with greater fulness important points in the general argument which had before come off with insufficient treatment.
Some contents
I. Introductory: history, material, the object of linguistic science; plan of these lectures. Fundamental inquiry. How we acquired our speech, and what it was; Differences of individual speech. What is the English language; how kept in existence; it's changed. Modes and causes of linguistic change. . . . . . . . . . ,
II. Nature of the force which produces the changes of language; its modes of action. Language an institution, of his- torical growth; its study a moral science. Analogies of linguistic science with the physical sciences. Its methods are historical. Etymology is its foundation. Analysis of compound
words. The genesis of affixes. Nature of all words as produced by actual composition. . . ,,.
III Phonetic change; its ground, action on compound words, part in word-making, and destructive effects. Replacement of one mode of formal distinction by another. Extension of analogies. Abolition of valuable distinctions. Conversion of sounds into one another. Physical characters of alphabetic sounds; physical scheme of the English alphabet Obsolescence and loss of words.