Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

social beings

A new, Victorian, prescriptivist English grammar has arrived from a bookseller in Canada:

The severe Roman bestowed upon the language of his country the appellation of patrius sermo, the paternal or national speech; but we, deriving from the domesticity of Saxon life a truer and tenderer appreciation of the best and purest source of linguistic instruction, more happily name our home-born English the mother-tongue. The tones of the native language are the medium through which the affections and intellect are first addressed, and they are to the heart and head of infancy what the nutriment drawn from the maternal breast is to the physical frame. “Speech,” in the words of Heyse, “is the earliest organic act of free self-consciousness, and the sense of our personality is first developed in the exercise of the family of speech.” Without entering upon the speculations of the Nominalists and the Realists, we must admit that, in the process of ratiocination properly called thought, the mind acts only by words. “Cogito, ergo sum, I think, therefore I am,” said Descartes. Whether this is a logical conclusion or not, we habitially, if not necessarily, connect words, thought, and self-recognizing existence, as conditions each of both the others, and hence it is that we have little or no recollection of that portion of our life which proceeded our acquaintance with language.

[...]

In reasoning from the past to the present, we are apt to forget that Protestant Christianity and the invention of printing have entirely changed the outward conditions of at least Gothic, not to say civilized, humanity, and so distinguished this new phase of Indo-European life from that old world which lies behind us, that, though all which was true of individual man in the days of Plato and of Seneca and of Abelard is true now, yet most which was then conceived to be true of man as a created and dependent, or as a social being, is at this day recognized as either false or abnormal. The reciprocal relations between the means and the ends of human life are reversed, and the conscious, deliberate aims and voluntary processes and instrumentalities of intellectual action are completely revolutionized. Hence, we are constantly in danger of error, when, in the economy of social man, we apply ancient theories to modern facts, and deduce present effect or predict future consequences from causes which, in remote ages, have produced results analogous to recent or expected phenomena.

[George P. Marsh. 1859. Lectures on the English Language, pp.1f. & 3.]