constructed by man. Nor are we at all certain of the relation, if any, in
which the greater families of languages stand to each other. The influence
of individuals must always have been a disturbing element. Like great
writers in later times, there may have been many a barbaric genius who
taught the men of his tribe to sing or speak, showing them by example how
to continue or divide their words, charming their souls with rhythm and
accent and intonation, finding in familiar objects the expression of their
confused fancies--to whom the whole of language might in truth be said to
be a figure of speech. One person may have introduced a new custom into
the formation or pronunciation of a word; he may have been imitated by
others, and the custom, or form, or accent, or quantity, or rhyme which he
introduced in a single word may have become the type on which many other
words or inflexions of words were framed, and may have quickly ran through
a whole language. For like the other gifts which nature has bestowed upon
man, that of speech has been conveyed to him through the medium, not of the
many, but of the few, who were his 'law-givers'--'the legislator with the
dialectician standing on his right hand,' in Plato's striking image, who
formed the manners of men and gave them customs, whose voice and look and
behaviour, whose gesticulations and other peculiarities were instinctively
imitated by them,--the 'king of men' who was their priest, almost their
God...But these are conjectures only: so little do we know of the origin
of language that the real scholar is indisposed to touch the subject at
all.

(2) There are other errors besides the figment of a primitive or original
language which it is time to leave behind us. We no longer divide
languages into synthetical and analytical, or suppose similarity of
structure to be the safe or only guide to the affinities of them. We do
not confuse the parts of speech with the categories of Logic. Nor do we
conceive languages any more than civilisations to be in a state of