LANGUAGE, AN INSTITUTION OF COMMUNICATION

In Whitney’s case it is easier to find statements about his concept of language than with Bréal, since Whitney wrote at least two important dictionary entries, one for the Encyclopaedia Britannica on ‘philology’, and one on ‘language’ for the Century Dictionary. In addition to these he wrote several important articles on the topic, for example, on language as an institution (1875, LI) (a part of the dispute with Müller and Steinthal), and on logical consistency in the science of language (1880). Bréal also wrote popular articles on linguistics, but he did not provide a concrete definition of language.

We know that both Whitney and Bréal vehemently rejected the view of language as an organism. In accordance with some of the later neo-grammarian writings they believed that language has to be defined in relation to human thought and action. Contrary to most of their contemporaries, but in accordance with most twentieth-century linguists following Saussure’s adaptation of Whitney’s notions, they regard language as a social institution and an instrument of communication. They also anticipated, or better prepared the way for, the definition of a language as a semiotic system of signs.

Whitney’s definition of language in the Century Dictionary reads as follows:

The whole body of uttered signs employed and understood by a given community as expression of its thoughts; the aggregate of words, and of methods of their combination into sentences, used in a community for communication and record and for carrying on the processes of thought.

(1897, 3346; cf. LGL: 1 and LN: 625, 629) (1897, 3346; cf. LGL: 1 and LN: 625, 629)

Whitney often stressed the social character of language, and we shall come back to this definition in relation to Whitney’s attempt to disentangle the roles played by the individual and by society in the evolution of language in chapter 5, pp. 100–4.

Language is an institution founded in man’s social nature, wrought out for the satisfaction of his social wants; and hence, while individuals are the sole ultimate agents in the formation and modification of every word and meaning of a word, it is still the community that makes and changes its language.

(LSL: 177; cf, also 48, 400, 404, 405; LGL: 280, 309, etc.)

Language in this sense is an ergon, to use Humboldt’s term. This interpretation of the word ‘language’ has to be distinguished strictly from ‘language’ in the sense of energeia or, as Whitney himself writes: one has to differentiate carefully between ‘a capacity, and

a product of the exercise of that capacity’ (LI: 723). A language is thus ‘a gradual accumulation of the results of its [the capacity’s] exercise’ (ibid.). The faculty of language, which is in fact a general semiotic faculty—a ‘sign-making faculty’ (LSL: 103)—enables us to learn the language of any community into which we happen to be born, to learn any sign system or any language spoken on earth, independently of the race we belong to. Bréal is entirely in agreement with Whitney in this respect when he writes: ‘If it is true that there is a general faculty of language, the inheritance of this or that language in particular is a fiction’ (LN: 629). Both Bréal and Whitney are decidedly anti- racist in their theories of language and this anti-racism is based on their evolutionist ideas. Whitney expresses this conviction most forcefully when he writes that no language is a race characteristic; a language is nothing more than the application of the fittest available means to securing the common end of communication (cf. 1885, Ph: 777; and Bréal LN: 633, 636, 639).

For Bréal too, language is a social institution, although he does not often use that expression. He talks instead about language as a collective work or a collective product (cf. LN: 627), having, as it were, an ideal existence (LN: 619), just like religions, laws, traditions, and customs. That is, although language is only the product of the accumulated linguistic labour of generations of speakers, these speakers have to comply to its rules as if they were independent of their will. Bréal also stresses the instrumental character of language when he writes in the Essai that language is ‘a product, begun and continued with a practical goal in view, from which, in consequence, the conception of utility cannot be absent for a moment’ (ES: 22).

The major goal of the use of language is communication (cf. ES 1913, 6th edition: 334), that is comprehension (cf. ES: 1413). In the practical process of language-using and language-making, as Whitney has said, the end is comprehension, the means is language. All the laws of language-change and language-evolution follow from this basic principle (see further p. 80). As such, language is ‘the most necessary instrument of civilization’ (ES: 22; cf. Ph: 776). ‘Languages, then, far from being natural organisms, are the gradual elaborated products of the application by human beings of means to ends, of the devising of signs by which conceptions may be communicated and the operations of thought carried out. They are a constituent part of the hardly won substance of human civilization’ (OLS: 315).

Change in language 52

If language is an institution, it naturally follows that linguistic signs, the elements of that institution, cannot be natural signs, and especially not natural organisms themselves, as Darmesteter had claimed. They have to be considered, indeed, as conventional and arbitrary. These terms do not have exactly the same meaning, as the following quotation shows:

Thus every vocable was to us an arbitrary and conventional sign: arbitrary, because any one of a thousand other vocables could have been just as easily learned by us, and associated with the same idea; conventional, because the one we acquired had its sole ground and sanction in the consenting usage of the community of which we formed a part.

(LSL: 14)

Arbitrariness characterizes language as a system of signs; conventionality characterizes it as a social institution.

But signs are not only arbitrary and conventional, they are also traditional, based on traditional use and handed down from generation to generation (cf. Ph: 769). Tradition is, in fact, their sole guarantee of stability and continuity, but at the same time, tradition or the transmission of sign systems from generation to generation, involving the learning of signs in new contexts and the application of signs for different needs, is the main factor of change and alteration.

Conventional usage, the mutual understanding of speakers and hearers, allots to each vocable its significance, and the same authority which makes is [sic] able to change, and to change as it will, in whatever way, and to whatever extent. The only limit to the power of change is that imposed by the necessity of mutual intelligibility; no word may ever by any one act be so altered as to lose its identity as a sign, becoming unrecognizable by those who have been accustomed to employ it.

(LSL: 102)

Language as a semiological system keeps its continuity in alteration through uninterrupted tradition (cf. LSL: 23).

Bréal too, defines words as signs, a definition that he borrows from the eighteenth- century philosophers of language, such as Condillac and which he finds superior to the nineteenth-century conception of words. Comparative philologists tended to regard words either as pure phonetic artefacts or else, on the semantic level, as living organisms (Darmesteter), attributing to them a sort of absolute existence. But ‘Words are signs: they have no more existence than the signals of the semaphore, or than the dots and dashes of Morse telegraphy’ (ES: 277249). Their existence lies in their (conventional) use, and in this sense is an ‘ideal’ one. Bréal also links the inherent conventionality of signs to their inherent mutability. The speakers of a language must be able to change the meaning of signs, to adapt them to new uses, if they want to keep up with the progress of thought and civilization. But this change constitutes no danger to language—no decay—and no danger at all to communication and comprehension either. On the contrary: a sign will Bréal too, defines words as signs, a definition that he borrows from the eighteenth- century philosophers of language, such as Condillac and which he finds superior to the nineteenth-century conception of words. Comparative philologists tended to regard words either as pure phonetic artefacts or else, on the semantic level, as living organisms (Darmesteter), attributing to them a sort of absolute existence. But ‘Words are signs: they have no more existence than the signals of the semaphore, or than the dots and dashes of Morse telegraphy’ (ES: 277249). Their existence lies in their (conventional) use, and in this sense is an ‘ideal’ one. Bréal also links the inherent conventionality of signs to their inherent mutability. The speakers of a language must be able to change the meaning of signs, to adapt them to new uses, if they want to keep up with the progress of thought and civilization. But this change constitutes no danger to language—no decay—and no danger at all to communication and comprehension either. On the contrary: a sign will

continue to be useful and comprehensible as long as it is in use—and being used means at the same time being transformed and adapted:

Once a sign has been found [by chance or choice] and adopted for some particular object, it becomes adequate to that object. You may mutilate and materially reduce it, it still maintains its value. On one condition that is to say: that the usage which attaches the signs to the object signified, remains uninterrupted.

(ES: 331302).

Signs are intrinsically variable because they are used by different speakers in different contexts. But this variability has limits, the outer limit being the need to remain understood by the others: ‘that is to say, it [the limitation] is of the same kind as the other laws which govern our social life’ (ES: 279250). Given these premisses—language = institution; words = conventional signs—Bréal and Whitney come to the conclusion that linguistics can only be an historical science and never a natural science.

LANGUAGE, AN INSTITUTION OF COMMUNICATION