Linguistics in General
lective manner; and therefore that the “life of a language” is a figure of speech, since language lives only by virtue of those who speak it. A more careful study of the Indo-European family of tongues threw much new light on the Romantic and the Germanic groups. This fresh light made it necessary to revise many of the earlier conceptions.
Whitney’s Life and Growth of Language gave a new impulse to the study of linguistics. The impulse soon was followed by a school of neogrammarians, conspicuous in which school were Brugmann, Osthoff, Braune, Sievers, Paul, and Leskien. This school cleared up the historic perspective of achievements in the comparative method of research; and it rendered the further service of placing the facts in their natural order.
In more recent times the most notable contribution made to linguistics—the most rational and comprehensive—is that of the late Ferdinand de Saussure of Geneva. Unfortunately Professor de Saussure died without
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