es of the growth of a tree, and what can we gain by
comparing things which we do not quite understand with things which we
understand even less? Many people speak, for instance, of the terminations
of the verb, as if they sprouted out from the root as from their parent
stock.(25) But what ideas can they connect with such expressions? If we
must compare language with a tree, there is one point which may be
illustrated by this comparison, and this is that neither language nor the
tree can exist or grow by itself. Without the soil, without air and light,
the tree could not live; it could not even be conceived to live. It is the
same with language. Language cannot exist by itself; it requires a soil on
which to grow, and that soil is the human soul. To speak of language as a
thing by itself, as living a life of its own, as growing to maturity,
producing offspring, and dying away, is sheer mythology; and though we
cannot help using metaphorical expressions, we should always be on our
guard, when engaged in inquiries like the present, against being carried
away by the very words which we are using.

Now, what we call the growth of language comprises two processes which
should be carefully distinguished, though they may be at work
simultaneously. These two processes I call,

1. _Dialectical Regeneration._

2. _Phonetic Decay._

I begin with the second, as the more obvious, though in reality its
operations are mostly subsequent to the operations of dialectical
regeneration. I must ask you at present to take it for granted that
everything in language had originally a meaning. As language can have no
other object but to express our meaning, it might seem to follow almost by
necessity that language should contain neither more nor less than what is
required for that purpose. It would also seem to follow that if language
contains no more than what is necessary for conveying a certain meaning,
it would be impossible to modify any part of it without defeating its very
purpose. This is really the case in some languages. In Chinese, for
instance, _ten_ is expressed by _shi_. It would be impossible to change
_shi_ in the slightest way without making it unfit to express _ten_. If
instead of _shi_ we pronounced _t'si_, this would mean _seven_, but not
_ten_. But now, suppose we wished to express double the quantity of ten,
twice ten, or twenty. We should in Chinese take _eul_, which is two, put
it before _shi_, and say _eul-shi_, twenty