Brute speech and human speech: “Those who put forward language as the distinction between man and the lower animals, and those who look upon our language as the same in kind with the means of communication of the lower animals, only much more complete and perfect, fail alike to comprehend the true nature of language, and are alike wrong in their arguments and conclusions. No addition to or multiplication of brute speech would make anything like human speech; the two are separated by a step which no animal below man has ever taken; and, on the other hand, language is only the most conspicuous among those institutions the development of which has constituted human progress.”
Language and culture: “Differences of language, down to the possession of language at all, are differences only in respect to education and culture.”
Development of language signs: the beginning slow, acceleration cumulative.
The root-stage: first signs must have been “integral, significant in their entirety, not divisible into parts.”
Earliest phonetic forms: the simplest syllabic combination a single consonant with a following vowel. See the article Hawaii (Vol. 13, p. 88) for a similar language even now in existence: “Every syllable is open, ending in a vowel sound, and short sentences may be constructed wholly of vocalic sounds.”
Character of early speech: “first language-signs must have denoted those physical acts and qualities which are directly apprehensible by the senses.... We are still all the time drawing figurative comparisons between material and moral things and processes, and calling the latter by the names of the former.”
Development of language as illustrated in Indo-European speech.
Laws of growth and change: internal growth by multiplication of meanings; phonetic change—the principle of economy (euphony); borrowing and mixing of vocabularies.
Classification of languages by structural types: isolating (Chinese); agglutinative (Turkish, etc.); inflective (Indo-European); or—a more elaborate classification:
Indo-European Languages