ABSTRACT
In the mind of the average person language is associated with writing and calls up a picture of the printed page. From Latin or French as we meet it in literature we get an impression of something uniform and relatively fixed. We are likely to forget that writing is only a conventional device for recording sounds and that language is primarily speech. Even more important, we tend to forget that the Latin of Cicero or the French of Voltaire is the product of centuries of development and that language as long as it lives and is in actual use is in a constant state of change.
