Are languages institutions?

While the present century has witnessed a truly wonderful advance in the study of languages, it has not yet yielded equal results for the science of language. Comparative philology has thus far borne off the palm over linguistics. The classifications of human speech, the historical development and divarication of languages, the processes of phonetic change, are understood to a degree of which our fathers had no conception; but the coordination and explanation of all these facts, the recognition of the forces whose workings underlie and produce them, and of the ways in which those forces act—on such subjects there is far from being that general agreement of opinion which ought to mark a matured branch of study…

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

William Dwight Whitney (born Feb. 9, 1827, Northampton, Mass., U.S.—died June 7, 1894, New Haven, Conn.) was an American linguist and one of the foremost Sanskrit scholars of his time, noted especially for his classic work, "Sanskrit Grammar" (1879).