38. But just as to a large extent laws merely fix, extend or limit, and more especially make consistent the norms of customary law, so also legal determinations treat the meanings of words. On the other hand this often occurs without any respect to customary usage, even in opposition to it. New concepts are formed, and for them new words are created or new meanings given to old ones. The legislator disposes freely of the material of language, but always holds it expedient to respect customary usage, by which indeed he often remains bound, even when he no longer feels himself to be so.
39. With exception of the indirect cases we have mentioned, there is not really any legislation for language, as opposed to the customary usage of language, which to so large an extent contains the great mass of social will referring to the meanings of words that we may almost always call it simply language. Nevertheless we find an important analogue in the activity of grammarians and lexicographers, when provided with social authority by the state, or able to earn it by personal prestige, the former case being nearer to legislation. Typical of this is the French Academy, the dictionary of which has undertaken with so much success to unify and purify the language; a satirist has called the hypercritical founders, “souverains arbitres des mots”. A much weaker analogy is afforded by the influence of authors who are accepted as models; and we shall revert to this analogy in another place.
40. Like these authorities, and often in direct contact with legislation, science also handles and influences language. It is legislative for the meanings of the words, which it takes from customary language for its own ends and defines—i.e., fixes the meanings as they are to be. Nor is the formation of new words strange to it—words which do not occur at all in customary language, which it calls into life while fixing their meaning, either by inventing them, or more usually by borrowing them from a foreign language. The meanings themselves, again, it may express either by similar artificial words (Kunstwörter), or by natural words to which it has left their ordinary meaning or given a new one. But it first exerts its complete sovereignty when it makes its own objects; i.e., when independently of what is already presented and thought of, it constructs objects and assigns to them old or new names. Its terms then gain a particular significance. E.g., the word “circle” (Kreis) has in customary language manifold other meanings, by legislation the word in German becomes the name of an artificially bounded
