ABSTRACT
Language has a real existence in the community of feeling possessed by those who speak it. A general theory of language is thus faced at the start with this difficulty; the linguist does not know where to place the bounds of his study, and it swings to and fro between individual considerations on the one hand, and considerations as wide as humanity on the other. There is a difference between language and languages; language is the sum of those physiological and psychical processes which the human being has at his disposal for speech. If a language is the distinctive mark of a certain thought-form, a comparative analysis of languages ought to lead to a psychology of race. Rural speech, or dialect as we call it, is often governed by stricter rules than the languages learned from grammars. It is written languages that admit of doubts and discussions among scholars, and over which, as Horace said, grammatici certant.
