But this divorce of spoken and
written language is of questionable advantage. It at once destroys all
permanent improvement in a tongue through elegance of style, sonorous
periods, or delicacy of expression, and the life of the language itself
is weakened when its forms are left to fluctuate uncontrolled. Written
poetry, grammar, rhetoric, all are impossible to the student who draws
his knowledge from such a source.
Finally, it has been justly observed by the younger Humboldt that the
painful fidelity to the antique figures transmitted from barbarous to
polished generations is injurious to the aesthetic sense, and dulls the
mind to the beautiful in art and nature.
The transmission of thought by figures and symbols would, on the whole,
therefore, foster those narrow and material tendencies which the genius
of polysynthetic languages would seem calculated to produce. Its one
redeeming trait of strengthening the memory will serve to explain the
strange tenacity with which certain myths have been preserved through
widely dispersed families, as we shall hereafter see.
Pages:
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49