Lectures On the English Language Author:George Perkins Marsh Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE III. PRACTICAL USES OF ETYMOLOGY. In the last lectnre, the distinction made in recent grammatical nomenclature between philology and linguistics wa... more »s illustrated by comparing the former to the physiology of a single species, the latter to the comparative anatomy of different species. Etymology, or the study of the primitive, derivative, and figurative forms and meanings of words, must of course have different uses, according to the object for which it is pursued. If the aims of the etymological inquirer are philological, and he seeks only a more thorough comprehension and mastery of the vocabulary of his own tongue, the uses in question, though not excluding other collateral advantages, may be said to be of a strictly practical character ; or, in other words, etymology, so studied, tends directly to aid us in the clear understanding and just and forcible employment of the words which compose our own language. If, on the other hand, the scholar's objects are ethnological or linguistic, and he investigates the history of words for the purpose of tracing the relations between different races or different languages, and of arriving at those general principles of universal grammar whichdetermine the form and structure of all human speech, his studies are indeed more highly scientific in their scope and method, but they aid him little in the comprehension, and, as experience abundantly shows, scarcely at all in the use, of his maternal tongue. But though I admit that philology is of a less rigorously scientific character than linguistics, I by no means concede to the latter any pre-eminence as a philosophic study, or as requiring higher intellectual endowments for its successful cultivation; and it cannot be disputed that, as a means of ethical culture, philology, connectin...« less